Brent told me at one point that it was called MarsEdit, because “Mars is cool, and Mars is far away.” It turns out that was the abbreviated version of the story. I was treated to a longer version in Brent’s talk at Çingleton a few weeks ago, and now he’s shared it with the world via his blog. The name was inspired by a Seattle cafe called “Free Mars”:

I was thinking about names I thought were awesome, and remembered one of my favorite place names: the Free Mars café in Belltown. It occurred to me that “Mars” was perfect, because Mars is cool, it fits with NetNewsWire’s space theme, and Mars is at a distance.

I probably never would have named the app MarsEdit. Who knows what it would have been, had it grown up from birth under my care. But by the time I took over the app, I was such a MarsEdit fan, as a long-time customer myself, that the name just rolled off of my tongue. Of course I would keep it.

I was just reading the eulogy from Steve Jobs’s sister, Mona Simpson, printed in The New York Times. She recalls Steve’s general obsession with “love.” I think many of us who care deeply for Apple and its products are touched by the emotional angle the company applies to its designs. It has been an honor to inherit MarsEdit because it’s also a very emotional product, to its passionate users and for its developers, past and present. Brent’s story helps to underscore that legacy.

I asked him if he agreed with how they made their money. He replied in the negative — he’d just done the design. I told him we didn’t take on any projects that we couldn’t ethically stand behind.

And here I’ll quote him: “Must be nice.”

And that’s when I decided not to hire him.

Almost 15 years ago I was working my ass off at Apple as a junior engineer in the System 7 software updates team. I was trying to make a reputation in my new career, but also doing my part to make sure we shipped on time. In a historical sense, most what we built is hard to get excited about these days, but we were doing the exact same thing that Apple does today: iterating to give our faithful customers a reason to stay faithful.

In a group that was primarily oriented around fixing bugs, my colleagues and I were especially susceptible to a problem that plagues many developers: once you’re on the tail of a bug it can be hard to stop hunting until the issue is resolved. Some days we worked short hours. A hard-won victory at 4PM might be grounds for calling it an early day. But other times, stumbling onto a glimmer of hope with an impossible bug that “had to be fixed by next week” was cause for camping out until the wee hours of the morning.

One of these marathon bug-hunting sessions had a coworker and myself working until 2 in the morning, bleary eyed, but desperate for a solution. Usually I would recommend rest and resumption when it comes to this point, but we felt sure we were on the verge, and this was an important, difficult bug. We had a breakthrough, and spent another couple hours verifying a fix, testing it, and checking in the code. We went home exhausted but jubilant.

I collapsed at 5AM and slept until 11, conscious that the bug-busting marathon was not over. My boss, my boss’s boss, and for all I know, his boss’s boss were all aware of what we had done. It was a significant win for the team, but there was plenty more to do.

When I got into work after noon, my colleague was already there. He was talking, in the common area of our floor, with a humorless, long-time employee who worked in an administrative role with our team.

“Where have you been?” she asked contemptuously. “We need to ask you about the blah blah blah.” I’ve forgotten the specifics.

“Sorry, I was here late last night and only got in a few minutes ago,” I said.

“Must be nice,” she answered tersely. Her words stung. I was young, trying to prove myself, and had just returned to the fray after helping with an important victory. She had left at 5PM the previous night and had a long, restful night’s sleep. Or at least, that’s what I assumed she did.

What irked me most about her “must be nice” comment was how profoundly void of empathy it seemed to me. I hated her for years because of this. In part because of her, I have since been extremely sensitive to these pithy, jealous expressions: they jump out like smarmy little diamonds. But when words like these occasionally get lobbed at me, I am not nearly as hurt as I once was. I tap into my own empathy reserves, imagine what a crappy life they me struggling with, and try to wish the best for them.

It’s not so nice to be a person who says must be nice.

I was lucky to end up as a Quality Assurance tester inside a software development group at Apple. I worked for the Software Update team, which was essentially responsible for diagnosing, evaluating, fixing, and shipping bug fixes for anything in the System 7.5.x era software that Apple was building at the time.

I was so bold back then that I told my bosses, and my bosses bosses, and my peers, and anybody who would listen that I wanted to be a programmer. I wanted to write Mac software. No, I wanted to write the Mac!

That dream came true on May 12, 1996, when I joined Apple as Software Engineer I in the System Updates team for Mac OS Engineering. I immediately went to work, fixing bugs here and there as fast as I could. I took copious notes, in an effort to assure my bosses that I was the right person for the job. How did I spend my time over the past 5 minutes? I could happily elaborate.

I was so nervous about my performance, so worried that somebody might notice I was a fraud, that I didn’t ask for help as much as I should have. When somebody assigned me a problem, I scraped the walls of hell to find the answers, lest it be revealed that I wasn’t quite as smart as I might have seemed.

All the bugs in our group were difficult. One day I was assigned a particularly vexing one. I had shown a knack for tracking down tricky issues, but this one stymied me. I hammered away at the bug but I couldn’t figure out the cause. I couldn’t even think of where to go next. I was petrified. This was it, they would learn about my incompetence and put me out to pasture. I decided to take a walk.

I clearly remember that balmy summer day in Cupertino. I was filled with dread. I walked from Apple’s Infinite Loop headquarters, across Highway 280 on De Anza boulevard, towards the expansive suburban doldrums of Sunnyvale.

My pre-hire boldness had abandoned me. “Maybe I should quit,” I thought to myself. “That would be a stoic way of getting out of this mess.” It sounds so dramatic in retrospect, but I was so sure of my failure, it seemed like an obvious move at the time. I talked myself through the facts of the bug in question, and simply could not think of a solution. I couldn’t think of a part of a solution. I couldn’t even think of a step in the direction of a solution.

I walked for an hour or more, and then returned “home” to my office at Infinite Loop. I sat at my desk and stared into the monitor, hoping against hope for some inspiration. My friend and coworker, Darren Litzinger, stopped by my office.

“What are you working on?” he asked.

“I have a terrible bug, and I can’t figure it out.” The thought of asking for help didn’t even cross my mind. But fortunately, my frustration spoke on my behalf.

Darren sat down in my guest chair and adopted an excited look. “Well, what do you know about the bug?” He was here to help. I hadn’t even asked for it, yet here he was. I could have asked for it at any time, and I didn’t even realize it.

Talking through the bug with Darren, he asked me to perform particular tests at the computer. I realized that we had completely different approaches to problem solving. It wasn’t that his were right or that mine were wrong, they were just different. As it turned out, his technique saved the day and we got to the bottom of the issue within a couple hours.

As I moped along De Anza Boulevard that afternoon, I thought that I might not be cut out for software engineering in general, let alone at a world-class company like Apple. After I retreated back to my office and got a surge of help from a trusted colleague, I realized that I was perfectly qualified for the job. Especially if I could ask for help every once in a while.

This pursuit was of course assisted by Google itself. It has a nifty advanced search feature where you can specify a date range for the results. Unfortunately the algorithm for assigning dates to pages seems really buggy, and you end up with a lot of false positives for the date range you specify. For example, Google was being talked about in 1973?

I was able to find some interesting newsgroup postings from Sergey in 1994. On August 18, 1994, he sought advice about booking air travel from San Francisco to Baltimore. In 2010, this conversation would almost certainly not happen, as any number of powerful airfare search engines crunch the numbers and compare rates across carriers, dates, and airports.

But even more interesting to me is a math question posed in 1994 about the Karhunen-Loeve theorem:

Hi,

I ran across a reference to a Karhunen-Loeve transform in a paper I was reading and from the brief mention it seems that it is relevant to my research.  However, there is no pointer to where I could find more information.

Could someone let me know what a good reference for the Karhunen-Loeve transform would be?

thanx
–sergey

Today you just type “Karhunen-Loeve” into Google to get the answer.

I got to know Buzz online, through his blog and through occasional chat sessions on IRC. As it happens, I moved away from San Francisco just before I got to know a number of people online who I wanted to meet there. But since I visit often, it came as no surprise that I ran into Buzz one day at a cafe in San Francisco’s Mission District. I was sitting with my coffee when Buzz sat down a few chairs away. I recognized his resemblance to an online photo and introduced myself. He snapped this photo of me. Afterwards, we walked down to Mission Street, caught a large street protest, and then I took him to my favorite thrift store.

I was relieved that Buzz didn’t hold any personal grudges against me. After my public critique of his decision to bow out of an interview with Cocoa Radio, he would have been entitled to. He was feeling the pressure of forces inside Apple. I was feeling feisty, probably partly because I had felt similar pressures as he was then responding to. My provocative post was sassy enough to warrant a vendetta, but Buzz showed no signs of holding one. I was grateful for that.

A lot of the themes in Buzz’s blog entry hold true for me as well. The desire to work for such a great company contrast with the lure of indie-freedom. Most people think I’m being dramatic when I say that I have regular dreams about my time at Apple, but it’s true. I have at least one dream per month. Surreal dreams about fantastic Apple office buildings, where my old co-workers behave somewhat more like characters from Twin Peaks. I’m always pleased in my dreams to be back in the comfort of my Apple life. These have become a regular staple in my subconscious life. A replacement for the “showing up to school naked” dreams of earlier years. That company put a spell on me, and it’s not likely to wear off any time soon.

I’m sure it’s true for Buzz as well. As he pulls away from the safety and comfort of that great Cupertino establishment, he isn’t leaving Apple behind. He’s taking a little piece of it with him, to share with the rest of the world. Good news for the world.

You’ll find that Apple employees past and present “just happen” to know the exact date of their hire. I’m sure the phenomenon applies to employees of other companies as well, but I bet if you take a group of 10 people, 5 of whom are Apple veterans, and ask if they know off the top of their head the exact start date for any of their past jobs, the Apple employees will beat out the others with frightening regularity.

One reason for this obsession with the date of hire is pride. The day you start at Apple, be it as an administrative assistant or the CFO, you’re joining a proud legacy, and you know it. I still remember the thrill of receiving that offer letter. I grinned wide, stared down at the relatively meager salary I’d be earning, and signed away my agreement to start in two weeks.

I wanted two weeks because I needed to emphasize the start of something incredible and new. I needed a rite of passage. I had been Daniel Jalkut, relatively bright student turned Apple QA contractor. Now I was Daniel Jalkut, Apple employee and engineer. I was part of the family, and I felt that everywhere I went people would just sense that I was different.

I traveled to Mexico during that two week pre-employment vacation, and suddenly I wanted to relate to everything Apple wherever I went. In Tijuana, where I walked across the border prepared to catch a bus further south, I spotted a night club with an old Apple-II era logo as its marquee. I was tempted to barge into the night club and announce myself: “Soy empleado de Apple. ¿Como están?” The fact that a group of Tijuana drunks would be totally disinterested in this fact didn’t compromise my feeling of kinship with them.

Getting My Feet Wet

My first manager at Apple was an extremely kind yet gruff guy who seemed to respect my youthful ambition to always do my best. Afraid that I would be fired when they found out what a fraud I was (a common fear among all people, I found out later), I kept copious notes for the first month, detailing every minute of time I put into the bugs that were assigned to me. When the first month expired, my manager checked in with me on my progress. I reviewed my notes with some dismay: I had only fixed 4 bugs (albeit some hard ones) in the first month I was there. The time had been spent on necessary tasks like becoming familiar with the sources, organizing my office, etc. I nervously admitted this during our meeting, to which he replied something along the lines of “Geez, leave some for the other guys to do!” He had expected a much longer break-in period before I touched the sources at all.

He was always straight with his employees, and never sugar-coated even bad news from further up the management chain. His first act of shocking managerial honesty came in the meeting where I learned I was being hired:

“They told me to negotiate salary with you. I am allowed to pay you as low as $X or as high $Y. Which do you want?”

$Y was about $15,000 higher than $X, and each was a lot more than I’d ever made before. I laughed nervously and said confidently, “I’ll take $Y.” During that first meeting I wondered if it was a manager trick to get me to take a low number, but over the following few years I learned it was just his style.

Give it to the New Guy

A funny piece of trivia about my first job at Apple is that I was technically hired to work on PowerTalk/AOCE, a technology which had just been essentially cancelled, and the former team laid off. Apparently Apple had to keep the sources “at the ready” and have somebody prepared to do a quick bug fix if one of the important clients of the software ran into an emergency. So they gave my manager permission to hire a general integration engineer whose top priority would be maintaining PowerTalk. This didn’t exactly thrill me, but the fact is PowerTalk opened the door to my permanent employment at Apple.

On my first day, I received three CD-R discs which had been rescued from the disbanded PowerTalk team. The PowerTalk source repository, as it was, lay in my hands. My responsibilities were simply to make it build. Anybody who complains about Xcode or UNIX makefiles should count their blessings. The PowerTalk build was fueled by a complex MPW script that, among other things, relied on the computer’s hard disk being named exactly the same as the PowerTalk build engineer’s disk had been named. Fortunately, I never had to actually fix anything in it.

My life changed forever on May 13, 1996 (a week before my birthday). Nothing I’ve achieved professionally would have been possible were it not for the encouragement, camaraderie, and pride that my coworkers and the company itself shared with me. It says something important that Apple still wielded such magic powers 20 years after its founding. And it says something even more that today those powers are as strong as ever.

Stay tuned for more “Remembering Apple” articles as I reflect on the past and indulge in nostalgia. From here on out all reflections on the past will be tagged “folklore,” in honor of Andy Hertzfeld’s folklore.org project.