I had an interest in programming at an early age. My dad would always bring home the old computer magazines from the IT department at work and I would pore over them. I got a bit obsessed with MIT AI lab myths in books like Levy’s Hackers. In a stroke of luck, I found a copy of SICP at the local bookstore in middle school and kept struggling through it.

I originally wasn’t going to go to university, but my parents suggested I go for CS. I transferred into Pure Math in my first term after the intro Java programming course asked us to implement tic-tac-toe without using arrays.

Basically all of the low-level programming and systems stuff was learned on the job, but it helped that my first job at Apple was working on WebKit’s interpreter (and later JIT), coming out of a Google Summer of Code doing the same thing. One of my coworkers on that project was an alumnus of the original Rosetta from Transitive, and he later ended up managing the group doing the transition to Apple silicon on the SWE side (I was part of HW Technologies). An interesting example of how things loop back in the industry.