Technology

I've spent nearly twenty years building software. It started almost by accident (researching a book on home recording pulled me into the world of music software, and one thing led to another), 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. The thinking behind it is simple: 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 about it is simple: 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 what that looked like up close, rebuilding one of my own books with it: where it genuinely helped, and where it didn't. 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: someone who has seen a lot, can put himself in your shoes, and can help you see the choices in front of you. I'm who I am because of the mentorship I got along the way, and giving that back matters to me as much as anything I do.

If there's a thread between the music, the writing, and the technology, it's the same instinct under all of it: take something apart, understand how it works, and put it back together so someone else can use it. The books, the teaching, the software, they all come from that.