March 31, 2025

#8: Pedro Piñera & Marek Fořt from Tuist

27 minutes

Back in 2017, Pedro Piñera was working at SoundCloud in the iOS Platform team. Their codebase was a mix of Swift and Objective-C, and developers faced difficulties when dealing with linking, build phases, build settings, and other complexities. Additionally, they would have Git conflicts in the Xcode project file.

That’s when Pedro decided to create a tool that would solve Xcode’s complexity by using project generation, which would abstract Xcode’s intricacies, instead of creating a new build system. With that, Tuist was born.

As Tuist’s users come from iOS and macOS development background, choosing Swift was a no-brainer, to encourage contributions from anyone using it. The tool was well received, the project became more popular, and the community around it grew over the years. One of the contributors, Marek Fořt, added support for SPM dependencies. Later on, he became part of the core team.

Facing the challenges of maintaining an open source project, Pedro and Marek decided to establish a company around Tuist. Their objective: to guarantee a sustainable future for the project and develop a better product.

In this episode, Pedro and Marek share the journey of Tuist since its inception, and discuss the challenges of scaling an open source project: what starts as a pet project can easily burn you out. They also explore some of the contributions they are able to provide to the Swift community, by extracting battle-tested parts of Tuist into reusable packages. Finally, they share the vision for the future of Tuist, by making it become more than a CLI tool. A broader ecosystem, with a server component and automation blocks, with the goal of helping developers in their workflows of creating software, testing it, sharing with others.