Jimmy Hickman
Illustrated portrait of Jimmy Hickman

Jimmy Hickman

Senior Staff Software Engineer · iOS · Petaluma, California

Fifteen years building software, most of it on iOS. Apps in millions of hands, a decade of mentoring the engineers around me, and a habit of learning the next thing early.

The language is whatever the problem needs, and it’s the smallest part of the job. Most of my day goes to the shape of a system and the people building it: setting technical direction across teams, mentoring the engineers carrying it, and owning the release, CI and quality systems everyone ships through. The part I like best is unlocking a team — automating the work nobody should be doing by hand, smoothing out the workflow around it, and clearing whatever sits between good engineers and their best pace. I’ve been doing that at the same company for over a decade, and none of it has taken me out of the code.

Away from the keyboard I’m usually still building something — a Halloween production the whole neighborhood turns out for, plus apps and sites that started as an idea I couldn’t put down. Usually it’s a gap I hit in my own work or life, and once I’ve built the thing that fixes it for me I can’t leave it there: I’d rather finish it properly and put it somewhere anyone else with the same problem can find it. I also play a lot of softball. Baseball was the thing growing up, softball is what it turned into, and it’s still the best way I know to get off a screen, be outside with friends, and scratch the competitive itch.

I’ve had a lot of jobs over the years, but if you asked me the most important role of my lifetime, it’s the one with the title “Dad.”

Get in touch LinkedIn

P.S. I built this whole site myself, too. Hope you enjoy poking around!

Work experience

The jobs that got me here.

Fraud investigation, IT, web development, then product and mobile engineering. Different industries every time, same instinct: make the thing in front of people feel effortless, make the work behind it lighter for the team, and hold both to a bar I keep moving. Nothing I ship is ever quite finished being improved.

Rakuten Rewards

Senior Staff Software Engineer · iOS

2015 — present

One iOS app used by millions, and eleven years owning what it was built on.

Cash Back shopping at thousands of stores, online and in person — and the iPhone app millions of people keep on their home screen to get it.

  • iOS
  • Swift
  • SwiftUI
  • UIKit
  • Objective-C
  • CI/CD
  • Release engineering

Highlights

  • Eleven years on the same product, taking on more of the platform every couple of years.
  • Owned client architecture for a large consumer app and the shared foundations several product teams built on.
  • Planned and drove multi-team projects end to end, across iOS and Android.
  • Mentored more than ten engineers across teams, mostly by proposal and example — writing the first version, proving the pattern, then handing it on.
  • Owned the release, CI and quality systems that carried continuous shipping.
  • Modernized a long-lived codebase without ever stopping the release train.
Download on theApp Store (opens in a new tab)
Rakuten iPhone app · screen recording

How the job has changed

  1. 2023 — present

    Setting the direction

    Most of what I do now lands through other engineers: the architecture I propose, the reviews I give, the patterns that outlast the project that started them. I’m still writing code every week, because direction is a lot sharper coming from someone who is actually shipping.

  2. 2021 — 2023

    Foundations and tooling

    I moved off features and onto the shared foundations, and onto the tooling around building, testing and shipping. It’s the highest-leverage code in the building: write it once and every product team is faster on top of it.

  3. 2017 — 2021

    The calls that spanned the app

    Features start to finish, plus the decisions that reached past one screen — the ones where the answer had to hold for the whole codebase, not just the thing in front of me.

  4. 2015 — 2017

    Learning a codebase with history in it

    I joined the iOS team in an Objective-C codebase with years of decisions already baked into it. I learned my way around fast, and shipped features to millions of people.

StumbleUpon

Mobile Software Engineer, iOS

2014 — 2015

I helped move an app millions of people used onto a language barely out of beta.

The web’s original discovery engine. One button that took you somewhere you would never have found on purpose, and millions of people pressing it.

  • iOS
  • Swift
  • Objective-C
  • Storyboards
  • Real-time messaging

I joined in September 2014, in the push to ship a major interface overhaul — The Next Web covered it ↗ (opens in a new tab) — and spent the next year on the rebuild underneath it.

Highlights

  • Co-led the implementation that moved a shipping consumer app onto Swift and storyboards — the first real use of either in that codebase, when Swift was months old, off an Objective-C base whose views were laid out entirely in code.
  • Built the Conversations messaging experience end to end: the share flow, the thread, the reply model, and the real-time behavior underneath it.

Illustrative reconstructions of the app, not original screenshots. StumbleUpon shut down in 2018.

CCI Global Channel Management

Software Engineer

2013 — 2014

Turning what one client asked for into something the next client could use too.

Enterprise SaaS that large companies ran their sales channels on — partner programs, incentives and the reporting around them.

  • Enterprise SaaS
  • Bootstrap
  • Client-facing

I worked straight off Client Services rather than off a ticket queue: they came back from a call with what one client wanted, and my job was to build it so the next client could use it too.

I also led a UI modernization across the existing platforms, bringing in Bootstrap for browser compatibility and mobile responsiveness on products that predated both.

PBHS

Web Developer

Aug 2010 — Sep 2013

Compliance that decides how you store a form field.

Websites, patient intake and web software for dental practices across the country, all of it under HIPAA.

  • HIPAA
  • WordPress
  • PHP
  • Secure intake

Everything here had HIPAA sitting underneath it, which is not a box you tick at the end. It shapes what you build from the first line, and it is why so much of this job was the boring, careful part done properly.

Setting up TruForm was all by hand at first. Every practice meant programming form fields into their intake PDFs one at a time, and every new client meant someone typing account records straight into the production database. That went about how you would expect — a developer’s test data got written over live rows, a table went missing. So I built an internal platform that took people out of the database entirely, and taught myself jQuery to build most of its front end, which at the time was a real jump in what the UI could do.

Highlights

  • Built TruForm, a secure online intake system that let new and existing patients submit medical and dental history before an appointment. Practices adopted it nationwide.
  • Built the internal platform that automated TruForm setup and maintenance end to end: client account setup, PDF form programming, client file uploads and downloads, and every database interaction behind a screen instead of a hand-written query.
  • Drove the migration off static HTML/CSS to WordPress, writing the custom themes and plugins that made one template deployable across hundreds of practice sites instead of hand-built each time.

GrocerTools

Software Engineer & IT Technician

Apr 2010 — Jan 2013

A two-person company, and the half of the job that was driving to the store.

A training platform for grocery staff — video modules, tests and progress tracking, delivered on in-store kiosks and iPads.

  • iPad
  • In-store kiosks
  • Deployment
  • On-site support

Two of us, which meant the job was all of it: the software, the hardware it ran on, and whatever the client needed that week.

Highlights

  • Built and deployed the kiosk software the training ran on — the machines themselves were off-the-shelf.
  • Built the iPad app that took the training off the kiosk and out onto the floor, including the streaming video system for pulling up and playing the platform’s training videos.
  • Wrote the deployment and administration system behind both.
  • Did the on-site installs, the support calls and the client training.

Wells Fargo

Internet Services Fraud Analyst

2007

I kept writing scripts to automate the work we were doing by hand.

The team on the other end of online fraud: phishing campaigns, identity theft and forged sites aimed at customer accounts.

  • Fraud investigation
  • Phishing takedowns
  • Scripting

Not a software job, and still the one I point at when somebody asks where the habit came from.

Every morning opened with an emailed list of accounts whose credentials had surfaced on the dark web. The job was to try each set against the consumer banking site by hand, and for the ones that still worked, record the account and what was sitting at risk in a spreadsheet for the team that locked them down and called the customer. That was the first two hours of the day, every day — so I automated it.

Highlights

  • Investigated online fraud, phishing and identity theft against customer accounts, and got forged sites taken down.
  • Researched how the campaigns were evolving, so the next one was recognized faster than the last.
  • Wrote the automation that replaced it: watch the inbox for that morning’s email, walk the list, drive a browser through the login for each set of credentials, read the page that came back to tell a hit from a miss, and pull the account details off the hits — then write the spreadsheet in the format the other team expected, ready to hand off. Everything since has been a version of that.

Yep, I built the folders too.

Testimonials

Here’s what the people I work with have to say about me.

Jimmy brings deep platform expertise and a long-term view of the iOS codebase that is genuinely valuable to the team. His contributions reflect someone who consistently identifies important work that others overlook or defer — and takes ownership of moving it forward before it becomes a crisis.
Rakuten Management2026
He consistently turns ambiguous, high-risk technical debt into structured, repeatable processes. He thinks ahead, identifies risks before they become emergencies, and builds validation into his approach before touching high-risk layers.
Engineering Management2026
His proposal and development of a scalable, role-based coding exercise system is a truly innovative solution. His collaboration with hiring managers, interviewers, and engineers demonstrates excellent leadership and collaboration skills.
Rakuten Management2025
Jimmy’s feedback from peers highlights his role as a driving force in bringing new ideas to the team and his assertiveness in executing these ideas. He has set a strong example for his peers, inspiring them to take action and contribute to continuous improvement.
Engineering Management2024
His technical judgment is trusted across Engineering, Product, and Design.
Engineering Management2026
His swift action during a critical production outage was invaluable, directly safeguarding revenue and user experience. Jimmy consistently demonstrates strong technical ownership, problem-solving, and cross-team collaboration. He is a highly valued and effective member of the team.
Rakuten Management2025
His mentorship has been invaluable, with positive feedback from those he mentors, highlighting his ability to guide them through complex technical challenges and career development. His ability to instill confidence and provide validation to other engineers is a significant asset to our team.
Engineering Management2024
Your continuous efforts to automate and simplify processes have greatly benefited our organization, reducing friction and complexities that impede developers, onboarding, and general workflows. It’s clear that your accomplishments are not only recognized but widely praised and welcomed by your peers.
Rakuten Management2023
Rather than using AI as a personal shortcut, he built structured workflows that other engineers can use to complete complex modernization work more safely and consistently. That kind of force-multiplying contribution is hard to quantify but meaningfully raises the team’s overall capability.
Rakuten Management2026
Jimmy effectively role-modeled a “Get Things Done” approach, consistently delivering high-impact results that measurably improved engineering operations and supported business outcomes.
Engineering Management2025
Jimmy has had an outstanding year, demonstrating strong leadership, technical expertise, and a proactive approach to problem-solving. His ability to mentor team members, foster collaboration, and implement sustainable processes has had a lasting impact on the team’s efficiency and success.
Rakuten Management2024
Your influence and trust among peers have been instrumental in the successful adoption and enhancement of engineering practices at both squad and organizational levels.
Engineering Management2023

The Showcase

A sample of what I’ve been building lately, start to finish, on my own.

Web · Homepage design

Stage Left Studio

I built a theatrical homepage for a Sonoma County performing arts studio, with a curtain-opening introduction, a cast of class offerings, and stories from the people who take the stage.

  • A complete homepage experience on desktop and mobile.
  • Keyboard-friendly galleries and a designed reduced-motion view.
  • Explore the homepage here; links to other pages open the existing live website in a new tab.
Explore homepage ↗
Stage Left Studio homepage, with theatrical curtains framing Find your voice. Take the stage.

iPhone · On the App Store

Walkups

A walk-up song DJ for an entire roster, run from one phone into the PA. Each batter’s track fires on cue and the lineup advances itself, so nobody is crouched over a playlist between at-bats.

  • Per-player start points accurate to a tenth of a second, so the song lands on the drop.
  • A Game Time screen built for sunlight and one hand: scorebug, lineup queue, oversized play controls.
  • The same scorebug as a Live Activity on the Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island.
  • Field music that takes over on defense, with AirPlay and Bluetooth routing.
  • Runs entirely offline, because the field is where the signal isn’t.
  • A team shared across coaches, with permissions per role.
App Store ↗ getwalkups.com ↗
Try it live

Mac · On the App Store

FitLock

Every screen on your Mac locks on a cadence you choose, and stays locked until you’ve done a real exercise. A reminder you can dismiss is a reminder you will dismiss.

  • There’s no Command-Tab out of it, and no second monitor still showing your inbox.
  • Six coaches, from gentle to genuinely unreasonable.
  • It never catches you mid-meeting: no lock while the camera or a call is live.
  • Streaks, and difficulty that steps up as they get longer.
  • Syncs between your Macs over iCloud, with each machine keeping its own copy of the data.
  • An Emergency Release, for when the screen has to come back now.
App Store ↗ getfitlock.com ↗

Product · Live SaaS platform

HOA Pass

Amenity management for homeowners associations, from a single clubhouse to a portfolio of communities. Everything a booking drags behind it — the money, the signatures, the approval — stays attached to the booking.

  • Reservations and approvals on a shared calendar, with the slot taken off the board the moment it’s booked.
  • Stripe handles the payments and the refundable deposits; a held deposit is a number the system is tracking, not a check in a drawer.
  • Digital agreements with e-signature, and certificate-of-insurance review attached to the reservation it belongs to.
  • An audit trail that answers who approved what, alongside the reporting, rosters and resident messaging a board runs on.
  • Per-community branding: each association’s logo and colors, on every screen its residents touch.
hoapass.com ↗
The HOA Pass home page: the reservation calendar and an approval card with fees and deposit.

iPhone · Submitted to the App Store

Dementoids

A wizarding arcade survival game. Fly a broomstick over the school — hold to rise, release to fall, tap to cast — and keep the rhythm going while the swarm closes in.

  • A chain multiplier that climbs to 3× and breaks the moment you miss.
  • A guardian charm that buys back a few seconds when the chain breaks.
  • Three playable wizards, each flying and casting a different way.
  • Waves that escalate. Mini-bosses, then bosses, with the fight re-forming around them.
  • Free, with no ads — the only thing you can buy is a character.
App Store ↗ dementoids.com ↗ Listing goes live at release.

And when I want something fun to build

Stranger Court

A whole street, rebuilt into somewhere else, every October.

An aerial view of the court at night, the street full of visitors in front of houses lit pink and white, the Starcourt Mall sign in the corner.
A neon-style Starcourt Mall sign glowing teal and red in the dark.
A green Welcome to Hawkins sign at the entrance to the court at night, the Mind Flayer and the light wall glowing red down the street.
The cul-de-sac at night full of visitors, a glowing cable strung overhead to a lit rig on a balcony, the Starcourt Mall sign on the left.
A Scoops Ahoy ice cream parlor set built into a garage, with a striped backdrop, rainbow lights and people in costume at the counter.
The giant Mind Flayer sculpture in daylight, its legs spread over the panel wall and the Stranger Things sign below.
An aerial view of the court at dusk, visitors already filling the street under a fading orange sky.
Four people in costume, one of them a Demogorgon, posing in front of a red-lit garage under a Stranger Things sign.
The Cerebro antenna rig in daylight: a steel mast with a dish on top, a control box on a stand, and a hand-lettered CEREBRO sign.
Visitors standing in the street at night, looking up at the rig strung overhead between the houses.
A life-size Vecna figure against a red-lit wall of panels, with a visitor acting like they are being pulled toward it.
A cinema front built onto a garage, its marquee and movie posters lit pink, with a couple posing out front.
An aerial view at night: a blue beam cuts across the court from the portal while visitors watch from the street below.
The Stranger Court street sign in daylight, with the rig already hung on a balcony down the street.
A group in costume posing in front of a hand-painted alphabet wall strung with colored Christmas lights.
A huge wireframe portal sculpture angled above a balcony, wrapped in fog and lit blue from within, a beam of light shooting out of it.
Visitors walking the court at night under the overhead rig, with a dog sitting in the foreground.
Two people in costume in an open garage, one in a police chief's uniform saluting, the other in a white lab coat giving a thumbs up.
A giant black Mind Flayer sculpture reaching over a wall of lit panels, red haze and fog behind it.
A house front dressed as a KB Toys store in daylight, with a cinema marquee on the neighboring balcony.
An aerial view of the court at night, lit green and white, with the crowd spread across the street.
A costumed figure in a curly wig standing on a red bike with a crate on the handlebars, lit pink in front of a garage.
A Waldenbooks storefront with Starcourt Mall branding, printed full-size over a garage door.
A person lying on the red-lit pavement with a Demogorgon mask while two people in costume act shocked behind them, in front of the panel wall.
A house front dressed as Starcourt Mall at night, with a KB Toys storefront, a cinema marquee on the balcony, and visitors along the rope line.
An open garage under a Stranger Things sign, lit purple, with people in eighties costumes hanging out in front.
The empty cul-de-sac at night, the houses washed in purple light and a glowing cable running to the rig overhead.
The purple Stranger Court street sign glowing at night, with the lit-up cul-de-sac and the overhead rig behind it.
Now showing Halloween 2025 - Starcourt Mall
See every year on YouTube Walkthroughs and light-show highlights from the whole build

It started as one thing I built in my own front yard on a whim. It is now a free walkthrough that takes over an entire cul-de-sac in Petaluma, run by the whole neighborhood, and thousands of people come through every Halloween — families driving in from San Francisco, the East Bay and the South Bay, hours out of their way, because a friend sent them a photo or a video of it. Somewhere along the way it turned into one of the Halloween stops people around Sonoma County and the Bay Area tell each other about.

It picks a new world each year: the Upside Down in 2024, Starcourt Mall in 2025, Ghostbusters for 2026. I lead the build and a crew of neighbors makes it real — a neon mall sign, a KB Toys storefront, a Scoops Ahoy booth, a cinema marquee, a spinning fog-lit gate, Vecna, a Cerebro antenna, proton packs and a containment unit — and I wire the lighting, sound, fog and motion behind all of it and cue the show.

It is also a production, not just a build: nine nights, a volunteer crew to organize, sponsors and fundraising for materials, and a website and signup system I wrote to run it.

This is the one I daydream about. I love movies and television, and I love anyone who can tell a story well — Stranger Court is where I get to build inside one. If I were starting my career over I’d point it straight at the film industry, and the long game is still a prop shop of my own: movie-quality props, animatronics, practical effects, the works.

What it runs on

Raspberry Pis running the show, DMX for the lighting, sound cued to the lighting, fog, motors, projection, and a stack of control boxes I built by hand.

Why it’s hard

A few hundred people walk through in one night, in the dark, at their own pace. Every failure is public and immediate: a cue half a second late is a joke that doesn’t land. Every year, it lands.

Stranger Court — strangercourt.com, opens in a new tab

Falcon Forged Ventures

Where everything I build on my own lives.

My own company, and the umbrella for the client work and products I’ve shipped on my own over the years: iOS apps, websites, and software for small businesses, owned end to end from the first conversation to the last bug fix.

falconforged.com
falconforged.com: a cream page headlined “We forge useful digital tools that make work lighter,” with status, agent and shipping cards floating beside it.

Why it exists

Because I wanted somewhere to build whatever I felt like building and be accountable for all of it — the pitch, the design, the code, the invoice, the support email. It is also the fastest way I know to end up somewhere unfamiliar and have to get good at it.

What’s in it

Client apps and sites, open-source libraries, and Jarvis — the agentic engineering workflow system I run across my own repositories.

falconforged.com

Public projects

Built to solve something.
Shared for anyone.

Libraries, tools, and experiments across platforms. A collection of things I needed—and made available to everyone.

Explore the collection Newest first

13 projects

Filmstrip Gallery

JimmyJammed

A textured filmstrip image gallery with seamless motion, an accessible lightbox, and an optional React adapter.

WebTypeScript
Try the demo

Dossier Folders

JimmyJammed

Tactile folder UI for stories, projects, and collections. TypeScript, React, rich media, and a customizable demo. MIT licensed.

WebTypeScript
Try the demo

Polaroid Gallery

JimmyJammed

Polaroid Gallery — animated web UI component with TypeScript and React support. Source-available under commercial terms.

WebTypeScript
Try the demo Source-available

gsap-web-toolkit

Falcon-Forged

House GSAP conventions for web work, distributed to Claude Code, Codex, and OpenClaw from one source of truth. Layered on the official GreenSock skills.

WebShell

light-show-manager

JimmyJammed

An asyncio cue scheduler for running timed light shows.

HardwarePython

hogwarts-light-shows

JimmyJammed

An open source project for running Hogwarts themed light shows.

HardwareUnspecified

govee-python-sdk

JimmyJammed

A simple package for using the Govee Cloud and LAN APIs in Python projects.

HardwarePython

govee-lan-api-plus

JimmyJammed

An expansion on the existing Govee LAN API for automating device fetching, controls and even custom commands like DIY Scenes over LAN.

HardwarePython

sonos-swift-sdk

JimmyJammed

Plug-and-play Sonos control for iOS and macOS apps.

iOSmacOSSwift

NWSTokenView

JimmyJammed

NWSTokenView is a flexible UIView subclass that shows a collection of objects in a similar manner to the Messages app.

iOSSwift

Built for real problems. Shared in the open.

JimmyJammed ↗Falcon-Forged ↗

A collection spanning years. Many older projects are no longer maintained.

Where AI fits

AI moves fast. Judgment is still the job.

I build agent workflows for the parts of my own work that are repetitive and verifiable — migrations, test generation, review passes, documentation, the first draft of something I already know the shape of. Every one of them runs with scoped permissions and a human read before anything merges.

It runs well past code. I built my own always-on assistant on a Mac Studio at home, wired into everything else I use. Different problems, same discipline.

The work is deciding what context the model actually needs, how to check what comes back, and when it should stay quiet. I get results from these tools because I can tell when the answer is wrong — the fundamentals still decide everything: architecture, ownership, debugging, code quality, and knowing what to do when the problem is ambiguous.

  1. I decideFrame itArchitecture, module boundaries, and what “done” actually means.
  2. AI draftsFirst passBoilerplate views, model layers, the mechanical half of a migration.
  3. AI draftsCover itXCTest cases and edge conditions against the behaviour I described.
  4. I decideRead every diffNaming, ownership, retain cycles, the thing it quietly got wrong.
  5. LoopShip & watchStaged rollout, crash triage, and what the next pass has to fix.

Models

  • Anthropic
  • Claude
  • OpenAI
  • Gemini

Local & routing

  • Self-hosted models
  • Ollama
  • LM Studio
  • Model routing

Where I drive it

  • Claude Code
  • Cursor
  • Xcode
  • Copilot
  • MCP servers
  • OpenClaw

In the pipeline

  • GitHub Actions
  • CodeRabbit
  • Evals
  • Review gates
  • Mac Studio assistant

Generative media

  • Runway
  • Higgsfield
  • AI-assisted video
  • Image & brand generation

The stack

What I actually reach for.

The tools I work in day to day — and a few from the workbench, because some of what I build has to plug in.

Swift SwiftUI UIKit Objective-C TypeScript XCTest WKWebView
Modular architecture Swift packages Design systems Server-driven UI GraphQL Observability
Git & GitHub GitHub Actions Xcode Cloud CI/CD Release engineering Feature flags Crash triage
Metrics & alerting Raspberry Pi DMX lighting Electronics Motors & robotics Fabrication

Off the clock

A few more snapshots of who I am.

Contact

Let’s talk about what you’re building.

Roles, projects, or a question about any of the above.