Nine-Year-Old Anvitha Vijay Is the Youngest Developer at WWDC 2016

Apple's annual developer's conference, WWDC 2016, is taking place on Monday, and it's one of the biggest events on the tech-calendar each year. Like many others, Anvitha Vijay is there with a number of iOS apps to her credit, whose dream is to go to WWDC and meet Tim Cook. But there's one key difference - she's only nine years old.

The Australian girl applied for a scholarship to travel to WWDC and was one of the people Apple selected for this opportunity, reports Fortune.

According to the report, out of 350 recipients of the scholarship, 120 are under the age of 18, and 22 percent are women, as part of an effort on Apple's part to add diversity to its developer events.

Vijay, who wanted to build mobile apps, didn't have any formal training, and learned to code watching tutorials on YouTube. "Coding was so challenging," Vijay told Fortune. "But I'm so glad I stuck with it."

Vijay's Smartkins Animals app teaches children animals' names and sounds, and although it looks simple, describing the process of creating the app, Vijay told Fortune: "Turning an idea for an app involves a lot of hard work. There are so many components to building an app, including prototyping, design and wireframing, user interface design and then coding and testing."