Welcome to Max Huckstepp's Portfolio

I'm a Senior iOS engineer at Strava.

My interests include fitness (mostly running), reading and meditation.

While running I often find myself trying to do calculations in my head to convert between pace, speed and finish time for a race distance. While this is not complicated math, it can be a pain to do repeatedly. I have built a few copies of this "Running Calculator" app in different frameworks over the last couple years.

iOS (SwiftUI)

I used this app to learn the new Reactive SwiftUI tools. It is much more a playground than a production App.

The learning curve was relatively steep and getting started was pretty slow but being forced to deal with types ensures you think through every conversion and and variable more carefully. Ultimately this leaves you with an app that is more robust and inspires more trust.

GitHub (Only takes a minute to clone and run)

React Native (Expo)

I built this app to experiment with Expo and deploy an App to the Apple App Store. The speed of development and DX was great, hot reloading is a total game changer.

Their were a few major downsides. Lacking native components like pickers and tabs made the app particularly ugly. Navigation was also a pain point even with this simple app.

The upside was I was able to relatively quickly and painlessly get an app deployed to the App store that also runs on the web and runs on Android (although I never took the time to get it on Google Play). It's no longer on the app store because I didn't renew my Apple Developer account.

Deployed with GitHub Pages

React + PWA

This was a piece of cake to build using React, Vite, Vercel, and Cursor with claude-sonnet-3.5. I was able to get 90% of the app written in a couple hours while doing very little typing. As I continued to work on the app to clean things up and add some more functionality I found that I needed to do a lot of refactoring and cleanup of messy repetitive code that Claude had written.

Ultimately I think I could have moved a lot faster over the medium term if I had spent more time up front reviewing and updating Claude's initial code. It would be interesting to try this again in a few months the cutting edge LLM to compare code quality.

Deployed with Vercel

Strava API Template

After I built a few different apps connecting to the Strava API I created a template to decrease the starting cost of spinning up a new app and connecting it to the Strava API. It was interesting to take an existing project and refactor it to try to turn it into a generic tool/template.

GitHub

AI Content Generator for Strava Activity

I built this app to play with Gen AI and to help me generate content for my Strava activities. Strava activities are notoriously boring if you don't add images or take time to write a good title/description.

Because the Strava API is limited I had to build a creating method for running the App. It integrates with Strava and if you add certain keywords to your description, it will create or edit your attached photos. It's a bit gimmicky but it's a fun project.