10-year-old Aussie app developer meets Tim Cook at WWDC San Jose

What were you doing when you were 10 years old? Meet Yuma Soerianto, this little fella from Melbourne won a Scholarship from Apple to attend the annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose.

His application was a bit difficult, because it requires the applicant to use Apple’s “Swift Playground” programming learning app to demonstrate their skills – the problem is, Yuma was self-taught, and hadn’t used Swift Playground to learn – so he had to go back to basics to apply.

The strength of his application though was in his apps.

In just a little over a year, Yuma – a fifth grader – has built five apps.

First up was a calculator for kids. Existing calculators were bland and the numbers quite small, and if you made a mistake typing in the numbers you’d never know – problem solved – Kid Calculator has big fun numbers, and when you press them the number is spoken out loud. Simple.

Then came Weather Duck – using your location via GPS, Weather Duck finds out what the weather is like where you are, and using a fun cartoon duck suggests what you might need to wear or take in the weather!

My favourite though is Let’s Stack – new to the App store, this is an addictive endless arcade game. Blocks slide in from the side and you need to stack them on top of each other without overlapping, anything that overlaps drops off and reduces the surface space for the next block to sit on. The higher you go, the narrower it gets – and it’s bloody hard!

Fortunately, it’s a very new app, so my highest score got me into the top 3 – I don’t think that’s going to last long.

Then there’s Hunger Button – using GPS to randomly find somewhere to eat, and Pocket Poké which is an app that simply tells you everything you need to know about all the various Pokémon.

Oh, and if that’s not enough, travelling with his parents to the USA, he built an app on the plane to help his Mum and Dad calculate the tip required at restaurants etc here in the USA.

Honestly, are you exhausted yet?

During a Scholar orientation today in San Jose, the day before WWDC opens, Tim Cook stopped by to meet Yuma – to say that Yuma was excited is an understatement “It was amazing, I never knew he would just come up and meet me, it’s been my dream to meet him”

When I asked him what he hoped to learn from the sessions at WWDC – he was quick to respond with wise words “I probably want to learn about in app purchases and how to make code cleaner and how to make a good app!”