Young Programmer Attends Apple Conference

Lenny Khazan, a 13-year-old student, has been programming for Apple devices since he was 10, and already has released three apps to the App Store.

The soon-to-be eighth grader recently got a huge bite of inspiration from the Apple itself — he had won a scholarship to the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, granting him access to one of the most renowned tech events of the year.

“I came back from this event with so much more knowledge and inspiration,” Lenny said. “After seeing the developers of so many popular apps at the conference, I realized the potential of the iOS and Mac platform, and the many possibilities for an app.”

For the first time this year, Apple dropped the attendance age of WWDC from 18 to 13. Tickets for the June 11 to 15 event, which retail for $1,599, sold out in less than two hours. Lenny was in school while tickets were on sale, so he couldn’t snag one. To his surprise, however, he had won the scholarship.

Cyril Khazan, Lenny’s father, said he felt happy and proud with his son’s winning of the scholarship in a competitive worldwide competition. Cyril also thanked the teachers at Woodmere Middle School and the robotic club.

“The best part is that he already appreciates how much more exciting stuff he has yet to discover,” said Cyril, who is also a programmer and taught Lenny at age 9. “As parents, we were also pleased by zero amount of our prodding throughout the scholarship process.”

Some 5,000 developers converged in San Francisco for WWDC, including about 1,000 Apple engineers, Lenny said. The event included labs “where you can walk in with your code, and talk directly to Apple engineers to fix your bugs and ask questions.” This year’s event saw the announcement of Apple’s latest updates to its Mac and iPhone operating systems, as well as new hardware.

“I saw the new products Apple announced, but more importantly, I saw how many other young iOS developers there were,” Lenny said. “The other scholarship winners were also very young, and talking with them to learn what they did and their experiences was very interesting. It's difficult to pinpoint just one cool thing I saw, because the entire experience was amazing.”

Lenny had previously released two games to App Store. The first was “Wordify,” a word-unscrambling game. His next app was called “Color Confusion,” where players had to match a color name to its color. The confusion came from a different color word being in a color box, and that font was a different color. Both games are no longer available.

Lenny’s most recent app, which he worked on with friend Matt Panzer, is Meat Calculator, which tells users how long to cook meat and to what temperature. The pair worked on the app with the middle school’s robotics team. The app won the first place Creative Presentation Award in the Nassau County First Lego League qualifying tournament, and the first place Creative Presentation Award in the Long Island FLL Tournament.

Lenny and Matt are working on another application, Tertiary, which they hope to release to the App Store soon.

“I definitely want to pursue a career in computer programming,” Lenny said. “I think that the field is always changing, and it's probably one of the fastest growing fields in the world, and will probably continue to be so for a long time to come.”