SAN FRANCISCO — She's the star of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference.
Anvitha Vijay, age 9, created an iPad/iPhone app about animals — Smartkins Animals — in Melbourne, Australia, and applied to be selected for one of the coveted scholarships to attend Apple's annual developer conference.
To her delight, Apple said yes, and now she's signing autographs, posing for selfies with grown-up app developers and hangin' with Apple CEO Tim Cook.
"He's really good," Vijay says, in an interview here. "Really nice."
Cook himself gave Vijay a shout-out during his Monday keynote as the youngest developer ever to attend Apple's WWDC, one of 350 mostly high school and college students invited by Apple to attend the conference for free.
At WWDC, scholarship winners get to attend coding and programming sessions, and mix and mingle with app developers, to learn from veterans.
"It was like a dream to be here and meet so many people," Vijay says. "I've just touched the tip of the iceberg in coding, there's so much to learn."
She started coding at age 7 by watching YouTube instructional videos, and was motivated to make an app to teach her younger sister how to identify the names of animals. She used Xcode, an Apple program for creating mobile apps, and has seen a "few hundred" downloads.
She's working on a new app, GoalsHi, to give students more confidence in the classroom. She used Apple's more advanced Swift programming language to work on the new app and is eager to try Swift Playgrounds, a new, easier version of the software Apple introduced at WWDC for kids, on the iPad.
Vijay, working the WWDC room like a pro, finishes the interview by walking up to developers at WWDC and handing out her business card, which has her name and a motto: "I want to make a difference in people's lives through technology."
Back home, she used her mom's iPhone (under mom's name) because you have to be 13 to get an iTunes account.
Asked to name her favorite app, "besides mine?" she cites the White Tiles 4 app, which was created in China, in 2014.
What does she want to be when she grows up? "I want to be an innovator, to build things that people will love and benefit from," she said.
Follow USA TODAY tech columnist and #TalkingTech host Jefferson Graham on Twitter, @jeffersongraham.
