Dev:Career advice

If you're a tweak developer applying for a software engineering (or related) job, here's some advice about how to present and use your tweak development experience to help you get a job that you want.

It's pretty common for independent tweak development to be a person's first professional-level software development experience, and it can be quite impressive to potential employers that you researched, developed, published, and supported your own products.

Working on your resume
Wondering what to put on your resume for your tweak development experience? "Independent software developer" is totally fine as a job title. In general, you can use "extensions" as a more formal way of saying "tweaks". You can say something like "Independent runtime modifications developer" as a more technical phrase.

You can talk about how you did reverse engineering, development, and marketing/support for extensions adding new features to an operating system - and note the number of people who purchased and/or used them. It can be really great to point out the part where you had to do independent research and reverse engineering on a closed operating system - a lot of developers don't have this kind of creative research skill.

You can say that your work was distributed via (or published on) Cydia, a popular software marketplace for jailbroken iOS devices. If you don't want to mention "jailbreaking", you can just say "Cydia", although many software companies understand what jailbreaking is and that it isn't bad.

Be specific about the frameworks and APIs you had to reverse and what you were able to achieve, especially for an iOS-related job!

People and companies that might want to hire you
Tweak developers have used their experience to help them build their own companies together, get jobs at prestigious companies like Facebook and Apple, build companies that got acquired by Google, and more.

If you're looking for a software engineering job, especially one in the Bay Area, you can ask around (such as in the #iphonedev and #theos channels) - there are a lot of potential connections in the community to people working at companies that might want to hire you.

Feel free to list yourself here with contact info if you work at a company that might want to hire people with tweak development experience.