I have often wondered what it would be like to work for Apple and now I have the privilege to find out! There’s a lot of amazing people on the WebKit team I have had the pleasure of meeting and collaborating with. Getting to do a lot more of that will be terrific. Writing this it’s still somewhat difficult to comprehend it’s actually happening.
Apple itself is the sole institution that develops computers end-to-end for the rest of us. It is hard to overstate how exciting it is to be a small part of that for a person that enjoys computing systems. And WebKit too is truly great. With origins in KHTML it’s a web browser engine that’s over two decades old now. But from my eagle-eye perspective the code doesn’t look it. The community cares about refactoring, long-term maintainability, and hackability of the code, as well as making it more accessible to new contributors with the ongoing move to GitHub. A lot of care seems to be placed in how it is evolved: maintaining compatibility, ensuring new code reuses existing primitives, and standards are implemented to the letter. (Or if you’re Antti, you might not read the letters and just make the tests pass.) And I have reason to believe this isn’t just the community. That these values are shared by Apple.
Suffice to say, I am humbled to have been given this opportunity and look forward to learning a lot!