Calendar and Contacts (2013-2015)

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Returning to Apple

I interviewed for two teams upon returning to Apple: The Calendar/Contacts team and the Siri team. In retrospect, I dodged a very large bullet by avoiding Siri!

The team I jointed actually had four apps: Calendar, Contacts, Notes, and Reminders. The final two got shortchanged due to the importance of the first two. And it showed.

As an aside, Notes and Reminders have recently moved to a new group and have both become quite nice applications. But it was a lesson in how hard it is to have important, critical apps worked on by the same engineers as less critical ones. You need to have dedicated resources.

My new team

I liked my new team a lot, with a special shout out to Sean Seguin, Sam Cates, and Aaron Thompson. But it did have some drawbacks:

• It was quite large at about 15 engineers. I thought I might have trouble with its size and I did. I was used to 5-6 engineers on a team.

• It was a very junior team relative to w…