Stacking airplanes to working at Apple — Mike Lee on PCs, Apple and the spiritual side of programming

By Mike Lee, Alpha Primate of the New Lemurs

Mike Lee is a legendary figure in the software development world. His company, New Lemurs, makes experimental educational video games. His foundation, Appsterdam, brings App Makers of every platform together, in cities around the world. Oh, and he’s into physics and neuroscience as well as programming.

He also happens to be speaking at Native Summit, a half day event for developers interested in building native apps across multiple platforms. Here he reveals the extraordinary story that took him from laboring to legend.

“As I have gotten to know many of my colleagues, I have come to realise that, even among a group of well-traveled and frequently challenged individuals, I have traveled farther, and over rougher terrain, than most people would like to hear about.

Suffice it to say, I did not have a computer growing up, did not study computer science in school, did not get an internship at a technology company out of college. Instead, I struggled to pay for school until they wouldn’t loan me any more money for tuition, then worked in labor for the next ten years.

I taught myself to code in the belly of an airplane while waiting to stack the next load of cargo. When I started that job at the airline, somebody told me that if I wanted to get out of the job, I would need to learn a skill.

Standing unprotected in the cold and the rain at the funeral of another dead coworker I thought of that advice. The first app I wrote was a piece of training software that saved the airline nearly a million dollars a year, with the promise of much more.

After two years of making apps for the airline, I opted in to a downsizing package that gave me a year of salary and benefits, and went to my first Apple Worldwide Developer Conference.

There I met Wil Shipley, who is a legend going back to NeXT days. We ended up hitting it off, and within a few months I had gotten rid of everything I owned and moved into a tiny room in his basement to begin what would become a three year apprenticeship. Then iPhone happened.

I often say there’s the destiny I was born to, the best I could have hoped for, and my wildest dreams, and they are all so far behind where I am now.

Even with everything that has happened since — winning the Apple Design Award, being demoed on stage by Steve Jobs, walking into One Infinite Loop for my first day at Apple under banners of my game while dressed like a pirate — the fact is, I got into app development like anyone else: with a humble prototype, a skilled designer, and a handful of people willing to give me a chance.

As an American who came of age in the ‘90s, I got my first computer at around the same time I got my first car. It was an older car, chosen by circumstance, but I actually enjoyed having to fix it all the time, and I developed a very hostile attitude toward other people’s cars, especially these modern monstrosities with their hoods/bonnets all but welded shut.

I felt the same way about my Windows PC. It was an arbitrary decision, but I grew up thinking life was about picking a side and hating all others, and I hated those smug Apple people the most. I hated Apple so much, I dumped a girl for buying a Mac.

Over time, working on the car started to become a drag. I just wanted to get where I needed to go, so I started looking for something more reliable. I tried a bunch of different ones until I eventually found one that fit.

Of course it was a Toyota, which got me anathematized from my friends and family, but it was good reliable transportation that enabled my life, instead of taking it over.

So it was with the computer. I tried a bunch of different platforms and eventually realized with chagrin that those smug Apple people were right all along. I bought an iMac and a copy of BBEdit and the bulk of my creative output has followed.

I stick to one platform for the same reason companies in Silicon Valley tend to launch their products just in the United States, or just in California, or even just in San Francisco.

For us abroad, it’s frustrating, because we know the world market is so much larger. At the same time, it’s hard enough just making something your friends will like, let alone strangers from another culture who speak a language you don’t understand.

When we dream, we tend to dream big, and we look at the whole world of possibilities, but when we build, we need to build small, because things have to get real, and real is hard.

Better to focus on products, and on making people’s lives better. If you avoid clever, time-sensitive hacks, and instead solve boring problems in markets that are not being served, there’s plenty of time to scale to meet demand, once there’s traction.

I do things on Apple because I know Apple best because I use Apple myself, because I like Apple. If by some miracle something I build on Apple develops demand on another platform, I’ll find people who feel the same way about their platform as I do about mine, and seek their help.

I think the multi-cultural marketing metaphor is apt when it comes to building native apps for multiple platforms. It’s easy to ship a box of bits to another country, but also then to bite the wax tadpole, and other famous tales of products that failed to translate.

As an iOS user, it pisses me off when the apps I buy have obviously just been ported from some other platform. I have appeared psychic to product owners when I’ve told them what platforms their iOS developers recently transitioned from, just by looking at their apps.

Platform is culture, and the challenge, as always, is to adapt yourself to every context, and not try to force those contexts to adapt to you. Again, it’s vital to partner with people who are native in those contexts.

Perhaps this speaks to the core of the native approach, but I do not think of apps in terms of programs running on a computer, but in terms of configuration, with computers as machines designed to maximize configurability.

I call that the spiritual side of programming, the idea that reality as we know it is a human construct, and if you can program a computer, you can alter reality. What makes an iPad exciting is not that it is mobile, but that it seems to become whatever app it runs.

You do not close the book program and launch the piano program. The iPad is a book that turns into a piano. Right now, we simulate that with the clever emission of photons, but one day we’ll be able to manipulate the structure of the machine itself. When the iPad is not a glowing sheet of glass, but a moving colony of nanomachines, that book really will become a piano.

With iOS7 we began to take that idea even further, with the goal of one day discarding the book and the piano, so the iPad is knowledge, that turns into music — the Platonic ideal of information and experience.

Eventually biology and nanomachinery become one, and there will be no more iPads. The perfect app is a big red button that does exactly what you want, and then the real question is, why have a button?

Want to see Mike talk about the difference between Good and ‘Apple Good’? Come along to Native Summit on the 9th of September at Genesis Cinema.