The member of senior management who was best poised to suggest who should work on it already knew me and thought I would be the best choice. Getting opportunities in large companies is a combination of nurturing relationships and luck.
... not to mention all the performance considerations and optimizations, also requiring a strong sense of algorithms and computational complexity. Wow!
Yeah, seems like most mathematicians (and physicists) I know who go into tech don't get past learning a couple of programming languages and don't have an interest in learning the depths of a how a computer works. Very impressive!
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.
This now makes sense you were able to work on Rosetta 2 mainly on your own!
I kinda agreed with him.
