For most 9-year-olds, the journey of life has just began; there are several years of work, play, and learning left before they are ready to make a significant contribution to the world.
Well, the story drastically differs in the case of nine-year-old Indian-origin girl Anvitha Vijay from Australia, who is all set to attend Apple’s Annual Developer Conference 2016 as the youngest visiting developer!
Initially reported by The Fortune, Vijay was seven years old when she had the dream of building a mobile app. After spending a year accumulating knowledge about coding on various platforms, she managed to learn the basics of programming. Now after two years, she stands in a position which most grown-ups would want to be in.
According to the report, Vijay has created a handful of iOS apps, but the fact that she is so small is bound to shock many able developers, who know how difficult it is to code.
She is attending this year’s Apple conference as part of a scholarship program, which is given away by the company to developers around the globe for creating apps on the iOS platform.
Most of this year’s visitors are below the age of 18—120 out of 350 global recipients to be precise. Another piece of good news is the increasing participation of women; this year 22 per cent of the total scholarship winners are girls.
Vijay strongly believes that creating apps can empower children and all the apps developed by her were inspired by her younger sister, who was learning how to talk and identify animals.
One of the apps created by her was the Smartkins Animals app, which helps babies to learn and identify 100 different animal names and sounds they make. Another app she developed educated children about the different types of colours that exist.
Describing the her app making experience, the nine-year-old said elucidated like a programmer that it required a lot of hard work to turn the idea into an app. She further went on to say that app building requires a lot of activities—prototyping, design, and wireframing, UI designing, and finally coding and testing.
But her app-building dreams have just started as she is already working on her next app to help children her age decide their life goals. Vijay will travel from her hometown in Melbourne to the Bay area with her parents to this year’s Apple conference.
Vijay concluded that it has always been her dream to go to WWDC, and mostly importantly, meet Apple CEO Tim Cook in person.
