Presented a chapter on Process management today… weehaw.
Victor, the developer of the QTSS training curriculum (and the instructor of the QTSS session in Santa Monica that I attended) dropped in just before lunch today, so he and I ate at the Macs Cafe. He pointed out a few notable personalities that happened by, and I bs’d about IRC :) Turns out his office is in the same building which houses the training room I’m in this week.
After class had concluded, I met up with Matthias (aka murr on opn), who works at 2 Infinite Loop, which is where the core OS / QuickTime development happens. I was gonna get a bunch of video, but it somehow felt sacriligious to do so, so I didn’t. Anyway, he showed me around a bit, and we talked about this and that… His development experience is insane.. 17 years of Mac dev, author of MacPerl, currently one of two guys that does all the speach stuff in Mac OS (synthesis and recognition). The speach stuff is incredibly interesting… it’s about the closest thing Apple has to AI. There’s way more going on under the hood than I ever imagined. I was fully impressed at the amenities at 2 I.L., including a pool table, a ping pong table, a handful of arcade games, and foose ball :) There was also a whole bunch of NeXT machines with what appeared to be every version of NeXT Step installed on them. I asked if they were actually used very much, and Matthias wasn’t sure, but he did mention that some of the developers keep NeXT machines around for reference purposes, which I think is pretty cool…
Anyway, tomorrow evening at 8:20, I fly back to Seattle. As much as I love being in Cupertino, I’ll be glad to be back home in my Chair and in proximity to all that makes Capitol Hill an attractive place to be :)
