The first computer I ever used was a Macintosh in 4th grade, generously loaned to me for the summer by my father’s uncle. I spent countless hours exploring the mac and playing games. Though I received a PC at home in 5th grade, I didn’t use a Mac again for the next decade.

During my time in engineering college back in India, I came across iWoz, Steve Wozniak’s autobiography. I was amazed by his creations and his relentless motivation to tinker and build the early Macintosh computers. That spirit of tinkering inspired me to move to the SF Bay Area. This was when I really dove deep into the unix ecosystem. It was Wozniak’s engineering genius, combined with Steve Jobs’ Product & Marketing brilliance, that seeded the Apple culture we know today.

In May 2014, I found myself at Apple’s Mariani office. I had parked my car there for a weekend trip with friends who worked at Apple. My main concern was whether the car would get towed. When I returned, the tires were marked with chalk, but thankfully, the car was still there.

Co-incidentally,  an Apple recruiter contacted me while the startup I was working at was going through some troubling times, and I went through a rigorous interview process. I took it one interview at a time, stretched across several days. Midway through the process, on a Friday night, I was given a homework problem: implement a variant of TF-IDF. The challenge? I was scheduled to travel to India over the weekend for a couple of weeks.

It turned out I was an expert on that problem, Just two months earlier, in March, I had given a talk on computing document similarity which at its heart used TF-IDF at the Bay Area Python Interest Group. As the saying goes, “Fortune favors the prepared mind.” However, I wasn’t out of the woods yet. The additional challenge was to implement the solution in Golang, a language I was unfamiliar with. So diving in, I learned Golang on the plane to India and implemented the best-crafted solution I could muster. After settling in at my parents home, I submitted my work. To my delight, I soon heard back and completed the remaining rounds of interviews after returning to the Bay Area. By September 2014, I found myself working at Apple Inc.  I attribute my working at Apple to a combination of skill, hanging out with friends who worked there & all that I learned from my colleagues at my previous jobs, they infected me with the energy needed to elevate myself. 

Working at Apple over the past 10 years has been an incredible experience. One of my favorite aspects has been the process of turning an idea into reality—collaborating with engineering, product, and marketing teams to launch features that now run on over a billion devices. This journey has been both challenging and deeply rewarding. Along the way, I’ve made lifelong friends—some who have moved on to other FAANG companies, some who started their own companies and others who I still see every day.

Charlie Munger has a quote “The highest form which civilization can reach is a seamless web of deserved trust. Not much procedure, just totally reliable people correctly trusting one another.”

Working at Apple I’ve experienced this, when solving a problem. Apple operates on the DRI model where each component has a directly responsible individual who is an expert. It is this seamless network of experts that makes it tick. What’s unknown to one person is known to someone else, and if you look around, there’s always someone who knows the person who understands a particular component inside and out. This culture of collaboration is what makes solving complex challenges both efficient and rewarding.

I’m filled with gratitude for the opportunities I’ve had and the projects I’ve been a part of. Recently, I received a tenure award—a beautifully crafted piece of aluminum, which is Apple’s way of reminding employees that even a simple block of aluminum can be elevated to its highest state. It is this devotion to Craftsmanship and innovation that excites me to be part of this journey.

With the advent of AI and the constantly shifting technological landscape, who knows what the next decade will bring? But I will always remember the 10 years I’ve spent on this spinning planet, in the middle of nowhere, as part of this incredible company. That’s something I will cherish forever.