Steve Jobs, the Macfather: A personal thanks

Visit the Steve Jobs First Next One More Thing Exhibit @CHM

Steve Jobs will always be my first code hero. He didn't write code, but he made code heroic. He led the greatest pirate crew of coders in the world to make the Mac. His passion for turning code into insanely great things captured our imagination and unleashed our creativity. Growing up with the first Macs and PowerBooks was like growing up with a trunk of Hogwarts spellbooks to explore.

Steve was my role model growing up. I had to find my fellow geeks and talk about it. I headed to Noisebridge Hackerspace to meet my fellow hackers and talk. For some people, Steve was an icon, but for many Mac folk, Steve meant much more than that. At Noisebridge, we gathered and made our way to an iPhone-lit vigil at Delores Park.

When I got there a woman was holding an iPhone with a flickering candle flame glowing on it. Reporters snapped photos. We spoke in groups, sharing our Steve Jobs stories and contemplating the lessons we'd most cherish as Steve's legacy.

A nice reporter named Claire Cain Miller from the New York Times came and asked us what Steve meant to us. It turned up in this story, "A Tribute, with iPhones":

Joe Edelman, 35, works for a start-up called Citizen Logistics. He was part of a group that went to the Apple store as soon as they heard the news, then to the park vigil. “We’ve been talking all night about what is it we want to hold up as a value in our own lives.”

Mr. Edelman described what it was for him: “He was one guy who stuck to a utopian vision his whole life — a platform that helps people be creative, and worked on that a long time. A lot of repeat entrepreneurs pivot to what the market wants. It’s something a lot of us in the Bay Area can use more of — that utopian vision.”

 Alex Peake, 29, was dressed all in black. The founder of Primer Labs, he was working on a game called Code Hero featuring characters like Apple cofounders Mr. Jobs and Steve Wozniak teaching people to write code.

“We’ve all started Internet companies using the technology Steve gave us,” he said, “and we all want to give back. Going for things that will change the world, not what’s hot in Silicon Valley right now — that’s what Apple gave us.

“What’s so hard about this is Steve Jobs’s Mac is my third parent. I’m reliving all the memories of my first Mac. It changed my life. People ask, have I met him? No. I saw him at a developers’ conference once 100 feet away. But he made you feel like you could do it.”

I worked in a Mac store in my youth and I studied computer science because I dreamt of working at Apple. In some way I and many Apple users feel we are all more than customers of Apple products, we are believers in a utopian vision and members of a digital family.

The founder of our tribe is at rest, but we are all of us stirred to renew our commitment to stay hungry, to stay foolish, to make a dent in the universe with that spark we share, and to spread that spark till every mind is freed to make its utmost mark on humanity.

Steve's example put me like so many on the path of code and entrepreneurship, and we all carry that banner forwards to bring the fight against the status quo with every sunrise so that the sun might set on a world with a few new artists and hackers ready to write their first lines of code or design their first graphics or write their first business plans.

The world is full of code heroes both famous and aspiring, and all of our work was made possible in part by the life of one remarkable man named Steve who rallied the greatest coders of his generation to make computers for the rest of us. Let's see what the rest of us can make next!

Thank you Steve.

-Alex