Hello and Welcome
Thanks for visiting my website. My name is Matthew Turk, and I’m a software engineer at Apple, based in Cupertino. Curiosity and love are the driving forces of my life. Some of my interests include journalism, astronomy, quantum gravity, bioinformatics, football, and the automotive industry.
A Place for “Every Kind of Brilliant”
From Christmas Day of 2008 onward, I’ve been a happy Apple customer. Today, it is an honor and privilege to work at this company as a SwiftData Frameworks Engineer. When I think back on many of my formative experiences, whether it was spinning up my first Minecraft server, rummaging through system settings, tinkering with NXT robots, or just messing around in Photo Booth with my sister, Apple seems to have found a way in there.
Then in middle school, when I developed an interest in iOS app development, Swift was a welcome salve after initially struggling with Objective-C. The design philosophy of Swift is principled, elegant, and intuitive, and now I hope to pay it forward by improving these tools and enabling more people to do their best work.
But Wait—There’s More!
Effectively communicating one’s ideas, catering to an audience, or relating to even the most disparate individuals enable the fruits of an initial ambition to materialize. My mission in life is not to recite the time complexity of a binary search algorithm or the thermodynamic limits of electric motors according to Carnot’s theorem. Technicalities are crucial, but without a way to spread the word and connect with people on a deeper level, the bread and butter (almost) might as well not be there.
- Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Drawing on an intersection of technical and journalistic experiences, my contributions tend to be strongest when I am bridging gaps between people from different backgrounds to enhance how technology is applied, emphasizing robustness and details but never losing sight of the big picture.
- A Love of Storytelling
Some of my interests include absurdist fiction, quantum mechanics, and football. I love to read stories, tell stories, and learn about how the methods of storytelling have evolved alongside humankind, including with cultural forms of innovation in communication.
Born of Stardust
As Carl Sagan once said, the atoms and molecules that make up you, me, and everything we know and love on this planet were “made in the interiors of collapsing stars.” One reaction to the vastness of the universe is to feel small and insignificant, but the way I see it, the fact that we are even able to experience and articulate the mechanisms of the cosmic evolution in which we exist is a miracle. Billions of years ago, the universe began in an incomprehensibly hot, dense, and confused state; now we have pole vaulting. We have bullet trains, Wassily Kandinsky, and cinnamon rolls. I dare you to convince me that that is not one of the greatest stories ever told. Not to mention, it is an ongoing story—and we are part of it.