“Where do you get your passion?” — A question from Tim Cook
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to represent Ancestry and my mobile development team in a one-on-one conversation with Apple CEO Tim Cook. This was at the 2021 Silicon Slopes Summit in Salt Lake City. Tim was the keynote speaker that day and the Apple PR team set up time with 4 lucky Utah developers. What an opportunity!
The dialogue was fun and engaging and Tim had a lot of great questions about our app development experience on iOS over the past 11 years. It was amazing to find out that Tim uses the Ancestry app on his personal iPhone. I demoed the new Ancestry Stories feature that we recently built and showed him how we are using App Clips to share this rich content. He said that it is a great idea.
During the conversation, Tim stopped and asked me, “where do you get your passion?” I’d been preparing for this meeting with Tim for about a week, had lots of talking points about Ancestry, working together with Apple, and exciting things that are happening with our mobile apps. But this question caught me off guard and I don’t think I gave the best answer in the moment. Now that I have had time to reflect, I’d like to answer this important question.
So where do I get my passion? What energizes me? What gets me excited to go to work each day and build great products for Ancestry with my team?
Creating meaningful products
The first thing that comes to mind is the opportunity to create.
Growing up I had never really thought of myself as a creative person. I think that I associated creativity with traditional forms of art, like painting, drawing, sculpting, etc. But the engineering process itself is a very creative outlet. Being part of software development projects, I get to work each day to come up with innovative solutions to tough problems. This creativity brings a lot of satisfaction.
At Ancestry, this process is combined with very meaningful work. With our products, we take users on journeys of personal discovery to help them learn more about their family history and origins. By combining data from family trees, historical documents and genetic data found in their DNA we help users learn more about just what makes them who they are each day.
Creating meaningful products at a company where I can make a positive impact for millions of users each day is exhilarating!
My team
Second, I am part of an incredible team.
Working and interacting each day with kind, talented, driven coworkers and leaders is a great pleasure. My coworkers are some of the best software engineers in Utah. They work hard and show great ownership in the work that they do and the code that they write. They teach and mentor each other. They share ideas freely that seek to improve our products for customers, our development processes as a team, and their engineering skills. Each year we welcome summer interns to the team who remind us how lucky we are to engineer and create. We participate in hackathons, where we get to come up with our own innovative ideas, develop them into products, and then see them come to life for our customers.
Working with great people everyday makes me a better person!
Great technology
Third, I get to build mobile apps using the best technologies and development practices.
What engineer wouldn’t want to develop applications for the hottest new gadgets that everyone is using and do so using the latest technologies and practices? Not only is it enjoyable, but it’s also a great resume builder. On the Ancestry mobile app teams, this is just what we get to do everyday.
Where do you get your passion?
So now I’m asking you. Where do you get your passion? I’d love to hear your thoughts and continue this discussion in the comments below.
If you’re interested in joining Ancestry, we’re hiring! Feel free to check out our careers page for more info.
