Patrick Balestra
Staff Engineer at Spotify
New York, New York, United States
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPatrick Balestra is a Staff Engineer at Spotify with 10 years of experience focused on mobile engineering and developer experience. He leads the Developer Experience Product Area in Client Platform, driving high-impact initiatives like migrating millions of lines of code into a Bazel-powered monorepo to accelerate work for hundreds of engineers. An active open-source contributor, he’s worked on bazelbuild’s rules_apple and the Bazel central registry (Bzlmod), adding watchOS static framework support and device-specific build targets, and contributed to Swift tooling such as an App Store Connect SDK. He combines hands-on iOS craftsmanship—building UI features, unit tests and SDK endpoints—with deep expertise in Bazel, CI/IDE tooling and monorepos to improve developer workflows at scale. Based in New York, he pairs platform-level systems thinking with practical UX sensibilities that benefit both engineers and end users.
11 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
High School, Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, High School, Theoretical and Mathematical Physics at Liceo Cantonale di BellinzonaBachelor’s Degree, Science of Informatics, Bachelor’s Degree, Science of Informatics at USI Università della Svizzera italiana
English, Italian, German
Stackoverflow
10,054reputation
493kreached
92answers
39questions
xcode
top-5%
ios
top-1%
closures
top-5%
asynchronous
top-5%
watchkit
top-5%
multithreading
top-1%
Github Skills (49)
api-doc10
dependency-management10
appstoreconnectapi10
ios10
multithreading10
model-driven10
appstoreconnect-api10
appstore-connect10
build-system10
swift310
model-building10
automation10
api10
sdk10
bazel10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
BalestraPatrick/WhatsNew
Oct 2017 - May 2019
Showcase new features after an app update similar to Pages, Numbers and Keynote.
Role in this project:
iOS Mobile Developer
iOS Mobile DeveloperContributions:18 releases, 44 commits, 18 PRs in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Patrick primarily contributed to the development of an iOS application, focusing on creating a "What's New" feature. They implemented UI components, including image and text views, using Swift and UIKit, and integrated them into a view controller. The commits show a focus on adding UI customizations, dynamic font support, and refining the user interface, demonstrating a focus on iOS application development. Unit tests were also added to verify functionality.
keynotesimilarappstorenew-featuresupdate
bazelbuild/rules_apple
Aug 2020 - Jan 2023
Bazel rules to build apps for Apple platforms.
Role in this project:Automation Engineer / Build & Release Engineer
Automation Engineer / Build & Release EngineerContributions:2 releases, 63 reviews, 29 commits in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Patrick contributed to the build process and test infrastructure for Apple platforms. Their work included implementing and testing watchOS static frameworks, incorporating the `watchos_static_framework` rule, and ensuring proper asset packaging. They also updated the build system for watchOS extensions, specifically targeting application extensions and ensuring the correct entry points are used, and they are working with Bzlmod by including it in the `MODULE.bazel` file. Furthermore, they made changes to support building device-specific targets.
bazelplatformsrulesapplebazel-rules
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