2 July 2019

Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda

categories: books, apple

by curtis

Creative Selection by ex-Apple engineer Ken Kocienda is a great read. He has an extremely interesting perspective on how a few aspects, the aspects he built primarily,of iOS came to be. Reading about what he went through as he worked his way through issue after issue and demo after demo was fascinating to me.

The two stories I found most compelling were 1: how Ken and his team came up with the Safari browser we all know and love by building it off of KDE’s open sourced Konqueror browser, and 2: the trials and tribulations Ken went through in trying to build the perfect keyboard for their prototype gen 1 iPhone they were working on in heavily guarded secrecy.

I love stories about engineers who are good at what they do and what they’ve gone through to get to where they are today and this book was no different. There are a couple of sections where Ken takes some time to walk the reader through some engineering concepts which is mostly fine, I just personally found them a little tedious since I’m already personally familiar with those concepts, but it’s all good. I’m not exactly the target audience for those passages. Overall, great book and I heartily recommend.