Just six months after joining Apple, Sal Soghoian's job was already on the line. In July of 1997, then-CEO Gil Amelio had just been ousted and the company's stock was plummeting. To right the ship, Apple brought Steve Jobs back as the company's interim CEO.

When Jobs took over, he went on a campaign to salvage Apple's remaining resources by hacking and slashing under-performing departments. The problem, Jobs said, was that Apple had lost its focus. The company was making too many products that people didn't want to buy. After years of leading innovation in the PC industry, the Macintosh's operating system had fallen behind its biggest competitor. "It used to be easy when we were 100 times better than Windows. But now that we're not, you don't know what to do," Jobs told the room. This was a big slap in the face—just two years earlier, Jobs had quipped that Microsoft "had no taste."

Soghoian in his San Francisco Bay Area home in front of an impressive WIRED magazine collection. Phuc Pham for Wired

Soghoian didn't like that. As Apple's product manager of automation, he was tasked with finding new and clever ways to for users take tedious and repetitive tasks on the Mac—like organizing a bunch of files at once or resizing massive groups of photos—and write small bits of code to complete those tasks quickly.

"No, you're wrong," Soghoian told the notoriously brutal CEO. Jobs fired back: "And you are?"

"I'm Sal Soghoian, and you're wrong. My technology is better than Windows."

He was the first in the room to challenge Jobs on his accusations. To Soghoian, the CEO's harsh words were a direct attack on his work. "I sort of saw it as 'I might be this dog on my square yard of dirt, but I know every bit of that square yard and you're stepping on my yard," he says, "'I'm gonna bite your leg.'"

As it turns out, Jobs was gauging the room to see who was passionate enough about their work to fight for it. Those were the people he wanted to keep. Soghoian passed the test.

Soghoian is a guy who's built a long career creating technology that lets users hand the tedium of repetitive grunt work off to their computers in creative ways. In the early 2000s, he created a program that let Mac users turn clunky, multi-step tasks into something that could be run at any time with just a double click of the mouse. This process, and the field where Soghoian's excels, is known as PC automation. Nearly a decade after the original Automator app arrived on the Mac, a group of hungry iOS developers were inspired to hard-code a way for apps to share information between each other. The creation, which built upon Soghian's work, made iOS more elegant and useful. These days, Soghoian no longer works at Apple—his position was eliminated in 2016. The coder is now working with the software company The Omni Group, where he's applying his knowledge of automating repetitive tasks on the computer to make tools for a new generation of users.

Follow the Script

In 1993, Apple released AppleScript, a simplified language for controlling applications on the Mac. You couldn't build full applications with AppleScript, but it did let you write tiny bits of code that could command programs on your Mac to run repetitive tasks in the background so you could go focus on more important things.

Key to AppleScript's success was that it didn't rely on esoteric syntax; you could write scripts in something really close to plain English. Typing "tell application 'Microsoft Word' to quit" would cause Word to shut down—no hiccups. If you were feeling crafty, you could even write a script that turned your emails into to-do list items, or one that found all the files created on a given date and dropped them into a specific folder.