Don’t ask me why. I was 12, and my granddad bought me a Mac. At the very beginning (perhaps like half an hour), it was fun. But, you know, is 1986, the Challenger is blowing up, Argentina is winning the World Cup, and the Mac has no games, and the Web is not there yet. The Mac quickly turns into a paperweight. A very expensive one, but still.

Let’s fast forward a couple of weeks, and, somehow, I learned that, by “coding” you get a deep dive into some serious math questions, like, for instance, calculate the nth Fibonacci number. “Cool,” I thought. “Math is fun, I bet it would be more fun if I don’t have to do arithmetic myself”. And so I went to the Computer Science library of the Universidad of Buenos Aires. The guys there were amused by this 12 years old asking “how to compute the nth Fibonacci with my Mac”. They explain to me I would need to learn Pascal, they even lend me some books (it was not allowed, and, sometimes, I would need to copy the code listings into a notebook, just to get home, and realize there was a typo, and the code was not working. Perhaps I learn how to debug my notebooks before learning how to code :))

A few years later, Mac Toolbox was ported to C. So I’ve learned C. And I was delighted.

And then Python. God, that was great. I mean, do you remember, I’ve started coding just because I was a math nerd, and now, I have a language that supports complex numbers just like that. And it was really, easy to learn. I love it.

We are in the mid-90s, and since no one is paying any attention I can tell you, just between you and me, Mac OS was terrible. But this is a secret. Don’t tell anyone. The thing is that we, as the cool kids we were, used to derided Windows while trying to hide the screen of our computers because it was crashing once again. It was a war. Everything was allowed in war and love. And then, this little experiment of this Finn guy is starting to gain some traction. The name was kind of funny “Linux”, but it was working. It was working much better than Mac OS 7.6. And it was not Windows. Say no more. We need to port it to the Mac. Because, you know, Macs were based on RISC processors, not the clumsy CISC (remember, we are at war).

Here we are. A bunch of nerds on a mission to port Linux kernel to RISC. It was fun. While it last. I got a scholarship for a Ph.D. program, and I had to stop to code for fun.

But, you know, there is no such thing as a free lunch. And one of the sponsors of the program enrolls me to work at Apple. They were porting Rhapsody. They were hiring anyone with some experience porting code to RISC.

I learned Objective-C. C + Objects without the cumbersome structure of C++ (and no, I won’t be talking about Java. I suffer enough of it in college).

I left Apple just a few weeks after they introduce the iPod. I mean, how this thing could beat the Zune? (ok, I know, the Zune was introduced much later. But I cannot avoid making a little fun out of it).

The next few years I code a lot of Web (and yes, “I’m Ariel and I’ve used PHP”) and Cocoa.

And then uncle Steve introduced… the ROCKR. No, I’m kidding, well, not really, Apple did introduce the ROCKR with Motorola. But, you know, then they introduced this thing called the “iPhone”.

Uncle Steve was pretty adamant about “you want to code for the iPhone, that’s fine, Mobile Safari is really great to handle Web Apps”. But, we were tinkering with the OS and trying to find our way in UIKit.

Since then, I code almost exclusively for the platform.