Saddleback Church
6+ years on one of the largest church apps in the US, shipping features, raising quality, and owning the mobile codebase.
Saddleback Church is one of the largest churches in the United States, with a mobile app used by tens of thousands of members. Over 6+ years I contributed continuously, writing features, fixing bugs, improving architecture, and helping grow the quality culture of the team.
A large-scale mobile app serving a non-technical audience demands reliability above all else. The codebase had grown organically over the years, with low test coverage, inconsistent patterns, and increasing technical debt that made every release riskier than it needed to be.
I embedded with the team long-term, shipping features while systematically improving the codebase underneath them. I introduced testing standards and wrote the foundational test suite, contributed to a major rewrite of the Companion app, and worked closely with backend and QA to raise the overall quality bar.
Achievements
From 15% to 64% test coverage
When I joined, the app had minimal test coverage. I introduced testing standards, wrote foundational unit tests, and gradually shifted the team's culture toward quality-first shipping, growing coverage from 15% to 64% and reducing regression bugs significantly.
The Companion app rewrite
The Companion app, the primary mobile experience for church members, underwent a significant rewrite. I was an active contributor throughout: helping plan the new architecture, writing key modules, and ensuring the migration was stable for a live user base.
Long-term codebase ownership
Six years on the same codebase gives you a depth that short-term contractors can't match. I understood every corner of the app: the quirks, the history, the trade-offs. That knowledge made every change safer and every feature better.
React Native / Expo / JavaScript / TypeScript / Jest / Azure DevOps
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