Hello Raycast! I'm Zsolt Benke.
Yeah, I know… here's how you say my name.
I'm a developer from Pécs, Hungary.
I like to make tools for people.
I’m making products for the web for over ten years now. I started as a web designer building WordPress sites; nowadays, I do Rails and iOS development. As a hobby, I blog about productivity and technology. I also do a little podcast with a friend called Agyvihar.
You can contact me in the following places.
Let me tell you a short story about how different apps competed for ⌘+Space on my Mac for years.
I switched to the Mac in 2007 after the Intel switch happened. Since then, I always had an app assigned to
2007: Spotlight
Spotlight always felt like magic. It’s built into macOS, so it has the advantage of being super fast. I used (and still use) Spotlight, but other than searching for files, it doesn’t feel like it can fully control my Mac from the keyboard alone.
2012: LaunchBar
The best thing about LaunchBar that it can search for stuff and then act on it—I can search for nouns and then do verbs on them. It was the first app that made it possible to control my Mac from the keyboard: I can call people, search the web, launch apps, AirDrop pictures, calculate numbers, convert colors, manage files from the same interface.
After years of using Spotlight, I reassigned
Nowadays: Raycast
In the last couple of years, collaboration got important. Tools like GitHub and Linear are awesome, but they don’t integrate well with macOS.
Raycast was the first launcher I saw which had really deep integration with these tools: I can still control my Mac as I can with LaunchBar, but I can interact with online tools quicker. After two months of using Raycast next to LaunchBar, I made the switch and assigned Raycast to
Why I like Raycast? All launcher apps are having the same type of UI: a text field, and a list of results. Raycast feels like Dashboard widgets were brought into the launcher. I can have different types of user interfaces in the same app for different tools, which makes it way more flexible but easier to understand.
You can imagine how excited I was when I saw you guys are looking for a software engineer to join the team.
Why do I want to work for Raycast?
I want to learn macOS development too
I like the web and I like the Mac. I’m watching WWDC each year because I’m curious about where are Apple technologies are headed.
I’m not hiding it: one of my goals in getting this job is to be near a native macOS app because I want to see how it’s developed. I started learning AppKit this January which is still the proven way of creating native macOS apps and I want to have this skill. It pairs so nicely with my existing knowledge of Rails and Vue.
I want to create honest products
A lot of developers don’t like wearing too many hats. I disagree. Products these days have so many moving parts, but you can have so much fun and creativity while working on them. I like to create tools for people at the end, so I embrace knowing the right framework for the job.
Ten years ago, I was frustrated that I could draw my ideas in Photoshop, but I couldn’t make them. I learned Ruby and JavaScript to be able to build the real thing.
I want to work in an environment where I can continuously do that.
Why do you want to hire me?
You’re Mac nerds like me
Mac nerds like to think about tools because they know that if they can shove a couple of seconds here and there, they can get better at the job at the end.
Developing productivity tools is hard. Simple questions like “How this will work?” or “How will this be used?” can trigger so many problems. Mac people are smart and can be passionate about their tools, so it’s hard sometimes to answer these questions. But we like to think about these things and come up with solutions, so people can get stuff done.
You love making productivity tools as much as I do
Raycast is an app that is the front-row for interacting with the Mac for so many people. It’s more than just a launcher, it makes us Mac users fly on the keyboard and get so much stuff done.
When I sit down on a Mac without Raycast, I feel I have to drive a car with my hands tied behind my back. For me, Raycast feels different because you design it to be honest and straightforward.
I try to use apps like that, and it’s even better when I get a chance to work on one of them.
I want to take this chance at Raycast!
To prove my point, let me show you some of the best UI interactions I did lately.
1. Calendar & agenda view in WorkLife
WorkLife is like Upwork for health providers. The most important part of this app is the calendar and agenda view, where health providers can manage their clients' appointments. They can get an overview of their weekly workload in the calendar view, and then drill down to see each timeslot in the agenda view. It's very straightforward to create appointments for their recurring clients in-place or insert a quick 30 minutes break for the morning coffee or launch. If something changes (because it will), providers can change their schedule on-the-fly via drag-and-drop.
2. Managing a project in Ecsedi Ékszer
A local jewelry store needed a collaboration tool, where each project has a history of every action took on it. It's like a CRM mixed with project management, so the best was to show a timeline, combined with communication tools and note-taking.
3. Filtering projects in Ecsedi Ékszer
Filtering is vital because Ecsedi Ékszer has thousands of projects. The best UI is a plain old customizable table for lots of data, so I created a prominent search bar with autocompletion for columns like status or category. A table-customization popover is attached to it, where columns can be reordered or turned off; we can even set up how many rows it should show. And of course, the table has sorting and pagination as well. I did the whole thing with Stimulus and Turbolinks on top of Postgres views and plain old ActiveRecord objects. Rails can export the customized table by parsing params from the URL, then rendering and converting the same view as a CSV.