APP KID

A notable debut memoir about identity, immigration, and computer coding.

It’s not the extraordinary experiences of a wunderkind building moneymaking apps while still in high school that makes this coming-of-age story so compelling, but rather the ordinary ones. Sayman’s biography is undeniably impressive: He built his first app for the iPhone when he was 13, and it quickly started earning him $10,000 per month. At 17, his 4 Snaps app and video promotion landed him a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg and an internship at Facebook, which he parlayed into a full-time job, where he worked on Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status and developed youth-oriented projects. By 21, Sayman had landed a big-money job at Google. His adventures at those secretive tech giants and his insights into their business plans and work cultures add even more fascinating layers to the text, especially considering his problematic home life with his Bolivian and Peruvian immigrant parents and his struggle to come to terms with his sexuality. Sayman is a born storyteller, and he manages to narrate without falling into the romanticized traps that plague so many coming-of-age memoirs. Even with his connection to Zuckerberg, there was no outside force to save him. He worked through countless challenges himself—via extensive Google searches, trial and error, and listening to others and deciding on his own. “How lucky I’d been to grow up steeped in the American belief—or fairy tale, depending on how you looked at it—that anyone could reinvent themselves at any time,” he writes. “That was the spirit that had driven me to wake up to who I really was.” At personal appearances, he would explain his life as thoroughly as he could because he wanted people, especially Latinx teenagers, to know that a similar life was possible for them.

Sayman’s superpower is turning his specific Silicon Valley success story into something sweet, universal, and inspirational.