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Rowan Petrov

I ship software by deleting more code than I write.

I'm Rowan Petrov, a staff engineer who treats a diff that removes a thousand lines as the best kind of feature. Twelve years of build systems, design systems and 3 a.m. incident calls have left me convinced that most products are one good deletion away from being fast.

Building Latticeboard and Onyx Kit on the evenings my day job leaves alone.

Work Experience

I move between companies more often than the average. It is almost always about the culture, occasionally about the build times.

Senior Software Engineer @ Apple

Feb 2023 – Present

Cupertino, CA

Worked on the Apple Music team
Increased the revenue of the company from $80 billion to $1 Trillion
Built a new feature that allowed users to listen to music while they were sleeping

I've been building a lot of things

Latticeboard

A practice arena where engineers rehearse front-end and systems-design interviews against a timer.

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Onyx Kit

A component workshop for teams that ship dark-mode-first products and hate reinventing a modal.

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Shadow Foundry

Copy-and-paste elevation presets that still look intentional on a near-black background.

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Wraith Studio

A two-person design and engineering studio that somehow keeps getting the job done.

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Harborline

One-stop shop for the web application work nobody else wants to scope, tailored per client.

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Latest contributions to open source

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What a site starter actually buys you

A starter is a finished site you adapt instead of an empty folder you fill. Here is what that trade really costs, what it saves, and the point at which you should walk away from one.

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Why a writing habit pays off

Publishing regularly is the cheapest way I know to sharpen your thinking. Here is what a small, deliberately boring writing habit did for my engineering.

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Uses

Ironwood 16 notebook

My main machine for the last eighteen months. Thirty-two gigabytes of memory means I can keep four containers and a language server awake without hearing the fans.

Slate 12.9 tablet

Overrated for work, excellent for everything else. I read specifications and long-form writing on it and never once opened an editor.

Kestrel 75 keyboard

A compact mechanical board with tactile switches. Small enough to travel with, loud enough that my family knows when a deploy is going badly.

Drift Ergo mouse

The free-spin scroll wheel is the only reason I can still review a two-thousand-line migration without hating my wrist.