Fastlane

As any iOS developer knows, testing and publishing apps for iPhones and iPads is a real pain in the butt. And Apple seems to invest a considerable portion of the Apple Developer Program fees into continued research for constantly finding new ways to keep you from being productive and make you pull your hair out. I can't count the number of times I just wanted to throw my Macbook out of the sixth-floor window because I was trying something as simple as pushing a new build for a published app.

If you ever want to know the true meaning of "Kafkaesque" — become an iOS developer.

What does fastlane do? Quite simply, every time I had the task to "publish an iOS app" or "push an iOS app update", I blocked an entire work day for it because that's on average how long it took to sort out all the certificate issues, keychain bugs, provisioning profile chaos, broken iTunes connect servers, nonsensical Xcode error messages, by-the-minute macOS crashes and freezes, and all of the other things that come with it, fully included in your Developer Program subscription.

Does fastlane solve all of these problems? No, and it can't, because the entire ecosystem is broken and designed around the core target of infuriating you. But what it does is automate the heck out of it, do as much as it can do for you, and almost most importantly: in case something doesn't work, it gives you error messages that you can understand because they contain information, and mean something. That is a completely unheard of thing for people developing on Mac, and it reduced my release process blocker from one day to one hour.

It will make you want to quit your job and go into woodworking a little less urgently.