Technology

I've spent nearly twenty years building software. It started almost by accident, with a book on home recording that pulled me into the world of music software, but it became a real career. I helped bring the first iPad to market, I was a founding member of the team behind Apple Watch and Health, and more recently I helped deliver Apple Intelligence. There's also a lot I can't talk about.

I'm also a named inventor on U.S. Patent 9,204,249. Your iPhone should always have the current, accurate time, and your alarms should always go off on time. This patent helps make sure those things are always true.

Lately most of my attention is on AI, and what excites me is that it puts the ability to build software in far more hands. Not everyone thinks in the syntax and grammar a computer needs, but plenty of people have good ideas, and AI gives them a way in. I wrote a whole piece about rebuilding one of my own books with it. It let me finally finish a project that had sat on my shelf for twenty years, and it still took someone who knew the music to make the calls that mattered.

A lot of my time goes into mentoring, and it's the most rewarding part of the job. I work with people at every level, from engineers to managers to senior leaders. Mostly I'm a sounding board. I've seen a lot, and I'm good at putting myself in someone else's shoes and helping people see the choices in front of them. I'm who I am because of the mentorship I got along the way, and giving that back matters to me and I show that by giving my most precious resource to it, my time.

If there's a connection between music, the writing, and technology, it's that I like understanding how something is built and then helping other people see it too. That's what the books are, and it's what the teaching is, and what the software is, too.