Once, in 1994 or so, I was sitting in a cafe with friends, and I had the crazy idea that I was going to write my own web browser. I was a college student at the time, and had played with Mosaic and … well, probably only Mosaic. But had also played with Gopher, and other protocols like SMTP, UUCP, and NNTP. In some ways I was perfectly situated to pursue something great, but I was only 19 years old and had plenty of doubts. Browsers are big. There’s a lot I don’t know. And jeez, on top of everything, I need to finish my schoolwork! As fate would have it, I never ended up building that browser. It wasn’t in my comfort zone.
Instead I went to work for Apple. When I say I “went to work for Apple,” I mean that I threw myself at the mercy of a Cupertino staffing agency, convincing them that I knew the first thing about Macs (I didn’t), and insisting that the only contracts I would take were for Apple. I don’t know why I insisted on Apple except that my good friend, who worked for Apple, had recently hooked me up with a discounted PowerBook Duo 210. The agency connected me to a group within the company that needed a very short-term QA tester. I put on my nicest clothes for the phone call, to improve my confidence, and I got it! It was the best weekend of my working life. To that point.
I had a few more short-term assignments before they sent me to an on-site interview with the System 7 Engineering team, where I impressed the manager by describing a binary search method I would use for determining conflicts among classic Mac extensions: “Disable half of them, test. Disable half again, test.” It was good enough to get me the job.
I was actually working for a group at Apple! Where? 1 Infinite Loop. At the time, there was no more prestigious address to work at in all of Apple.
The moment I got my foot in the door, I let management know that I was really after an engineering job. “I’m going to be the best QA engineer you’ve ever seen, but I really want to write code for the Mac.” Or something like that. Having the gall to say something affected things. I got the attention of the Director of the department, who liked my initiative and assigned one of his staff developers to be my mentor.
My mentor gave me tasks to pursue on my own time, out of work hours. I programmed every night, at home, doing whatever he asked me to. In retrospect he sounds a little sadistic, but I ended up with a text editor written in Motorola 68K Assembly language. It was a learning experience.
When a new engineering job opened up in that group, I was among the first to know. Of course I applied. And I was interviewed, put through the friendly (though not easy) wringer of justifying my worth to all my co-workers and was ultimately hired. I really cut my teeth in that group. Some of the people I worked with are absolute legends. Every time I felt over my head, I was terrified. Like many people I worried I had made the wrong choice. I was in the wrong job. But inevitably one of my mentors would pull me out, put my head on straight, and teach me to move forward. What a blessing.
At one point I was assigned to a “special project.” I won’t give too many details, because I still respect the confidentiality agreement that Apple expects from all its employees. It’s been 25 years since I drew a salary from the company, but I’m still “employee emeritus.” Anyway, the only detail I’ll share about this special project is that it involved a custom, Apple-made web browser. Before Safari. Or maybe Safari was getting started and I didn’t even know about it yet, but we were going to make a self-contained web browser, expected to run on Mac OS 9. They put me in charge of it. No problem.
That project never went very far. Years later, I wondered if it was, at least in part, because people at higher levels knew about the Safari and WebKit projects. If so, no offense taken! The browser I was asked to create was a billion times more complex than what I had in mind when i dreamed about doing something in that cafe, but far less robust than what Safari ended up being. Still, I did end up “working on my own web browser” after all.
When faced with the prospect of making my own web browser in 1994, I said “no”, or at least I implied “no” by omission. But when faced with so many other challenges over the course of my career, I said “yes.” Again and again. I said yes to interviewing at a contract agency. I said yes to interviewing at Apple. I said yes to joining an engineering team. I said yes to making a name for myself. I said yes to working on a weird custom web browser. I said yes working long and hard, and ultimately I said “yes” to a lot of other things in life. And I’m still not very comfortable getting out of my comfort zone.