Kakao Unveils 6-Week Technical Onboarding Program for New iOS Developers

Kakao has unveiled a 6-week technical onboarding program for new iOS and macOS developers. The course focuses on helping crew members with limited job experience understand the Swift language and iOS development environment, providing a foundation for self-directed learning and adaptation to work.

Curriculum and Project Structure

The onboarding consists of live sessions led by Yagom, group activities, and weekly hands-on projects. New crews directly implement apps such as a login screen, a world expo, a notepad, and an open market by applying core concepts like Auto Layout, UITableView, CoreData, and UICollectionView. In particular, the final open market project involves communicating with a server using URLSession to experience actual development workflows.

Deep Dive into Core Technical Concepts

Beyond simple feature implementation, the program emphasizes understanding the fundamental principles of iOS development. It analyzes the working mechanism of the Delegation Pattern through Protocols and object relationships, and teaches how to resolve layout conflicts by examining the priority values of Intrinsic Content Size, Content Hugging, and Compression Resistance, which are the causes of warnings in Auto Layout. Additionally, it verifies via runtime debugging how the invocation of viewWillAppear in the View Life Cycle varies depending on changes in the View Hierarchy.

Practical Competency Building Activities

Collaboration skills are honed through code reviews and pair programming. During the review process via PRs, participants cultivate the habit of designing code by asking "why" regarding naming, consistency, and refactoring. In pair programming, they alternate between the Driver and Navigator roles to resolve issues in real time and improve code comprehension. A key feature is the emphasis on the ability to solve problems by directly referring to official documentation (Apple Developer Documentation).