Keyboard Engineers - Were Piper Dem Ye?

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We were all demoing to ourselves all the time. And so henri waved the magic wand everybody now is a keyboard engineer. Everybody needs to figure out how we're going to make a reliable keyboard that's delightful. We started making demos and again, trying to combat this problem of the keys being too small. One idea that we experimented with was making larger keys with multiple letters on the keys.

In this wide-ranging conversation from April 2019, a16z’s Frank Chen sits down with Ken Kocienda, a longtime software engineer and designer at Apple from 2001 to 2017, who wrote a book about his career there, called Creative Selection.

They discuss Ken’s unconventional path from freelance photographer to software engineer at Apple, his work on many core products from Safari web browser to iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch and features like Autocorrect, what it was like to demo new products for Steve Jobs, and more.