The man who typed 10,000 lines of music code by hand, won Apple's WWDC scholarship on 3 hours of sleep, and built tools until one got acquired.
Most developers talk about shipping. Rudrank Riyam sets an alarm at 3am and actually does it.
In March 2019, Apple announced its annual WWDC Scholarship competition. Applicants had roughly 10 days to build a Swift Playground that would impress a room full of engineers in Cupertino. Rudrank saw the announcement and thought of his mother - a teacher at a special school for children with autism spectrum disorder in India. He decided to build an AR game using ARKit and SceneKit designed to help kids learn through spatial interaction.
He worked 110+ hours over those 10 days. Sleeping three to four hours a night. Debugging with coffee and stubbornness. The result landed him one of approximately 350 scholarships awarded globally - and one of just 15 given to applicants from India. He was the only scholar selected from New Delhi.
That summer in San Jose, he called it "the best week of my life." He was a university student in Delhi paying $60 a semester in tuition fees. Within months he had an Apple interview, then a second, and by summer 2020 he was interning remotely on Apple's Voice Control team in Cupertino.
The code he writes now is calmer than those 10-day sprint sessions. But the output speed has not changed.
"While you might know me for ASC CLI recently, my first successful open-source project was MusadoraKit. It is still one of my favorite things I have ever built - that too pre-AI coding era!"- Rudrank Riyam, on X
If you want to build an app that talks to Apple Music, the default path is MusicKit - Apple's framework that wraps their music API in Swift. It works. It is also, by most accounts, tedious to use at scale.
Rudrank Riyam spent 4.5 years fixing that. MusadoraKit is a Swift framework that sits on top of MusicKit and gives developers cleaner, more expressive tools for searching songs, queuing playlists, handling catalog requests, and managing user music libraries. The framework is a companion, not a replacement - the kind of layer that makes working with complex Apple APIs feel less like archaeology.
He built every line of it by hand. Pre-AI. No Copilot, no ChatGPT, no code generation. Around 10,000 lines of Swift typed character by character. In his own words: "like a mad-man."
The result: 470+ GitHub stars, 33 forks, and a companion book - "Exploring MusicKit and Apple Music API" - that spans 69 chapters, 10 sections, and earned a perfect 5.0/5 rating on Gumroad. He also ran a 22-article series on exploringmusickit.com between 2021 and 2024.
MusadoraKit was the foundation. It gave him credibility in the Apple developer community, a writing portfolio, and the discipline to ship complex technical tools. Everything that came after - the other Swift packages, the CLI, the acquisition - traces back to it.
FROM HIS OWN BLOG
"4.5 years of this package! I manually typed ten thousand lines of code like a mad-man."
App Store Connect is Apple's developer portal for managing apps, TestFlight builds, pricing, in-app purchases, and certificates. It is a necessary part of every iOS developer's workflow. It is also, famously, a place where clicking through menus feels like archaeological fieldwork from the 2000s.
Rudrank built ASC CLI in Go - a fast, scriptable command-line interface that covers 1,200+ App Store Connect API endpoints, 80+ command groups, and ships with 13 pre-built AI agent skills. The tool made it possible to automate the most repetitive parts of App Store management from a terminal window.
The motivation was direct: "Setting up subscriptions is the part of iOS development I dread... it is tedious." So he automated it. Then kept going. The result was a comprehensive CLI that became a real product with a website at asccli.sh - and eventually, an acquisition. The buyer has not been publicly disclosed.
Getting a dev tool acquired is not common. It requires the tool to be specific enough to be genuinely useful and broad enough to be worth buying. ASC CLI hit both marks.
His Words on the Tool
"Setting up subscriptions is the part of iOS development I dread... it is tedious." - Then he built a CLI to handle it.His WWDC project was an AR game for children with autism. His Google Summer of Code project added VoiceOver to Rocket.Chat. His conference talks feature accessibility themes. This is not marketing - his mother teaches at a special needs school.
He shares everything: the failures, the milestones, the acquisition news, the "I'm going indie" posts. He won a RevenueCat award specifically for this transparency. The AiOS Dispatch newsletter is an ongoing record of what he's learning and building.
He reaches for new Apple APIs immediately. LiquidGlasKit appeared shortly after Apple introduced liquid glass effects. VecturaKit used MLTensor as soon as it was viable. He treats new Apple releases as opportunities, not waiting games.
"I must adopt a solution-oriented mindset in this new life, to ship more and earn the lifestyle that I want."- Rudrank Riyam, on going indie
In 2025, Rudrank joined Rork - a startup building AI-powered no-code mobile app creation tools. Rork raised a $15 million seed round and sits at the intersection of two things Rudrank has spent years thinking about: making iOS development more accessible, and applying AI to developer workflows.
It is a notable shift for someone who spent years writing raw Swift. But the move makes sense when you trace his arc: every tool he has built has been about lowering friction. MusadoraKit lowered the friction of MusicKit. ASC CLI lowered the friction of App Store Connect. Rork, by design, lowers the friction of building mobile apps entirely.
Alongside his Rork work, he continues shipping. The AiOS Dispatch newsletter tracks his thinking on AI and iOS development in real time. He ported the Qwen 3VL 4B vision model from Python to Swift using MLX - one of the first to do it. He released a full "AI + iOS Development" book available for pre-order.
His LinkedIn bio now reads: "Creator of ASC CLI (acquired) | Building Rork." Concise. Accurate. The kind of line that takes years to earn.
AI-powered no-code mobile app creation platform. $15M seed round. Rudrank joined after his ASC CLI was acquired.
10+ issues published. Covers AI tools, Foundation Models framework, MLX, language model integration in iOS apps. A running log of what he's learning week by week.
aiosdispatch.com →Pre-order available. Includes free updates post-WWDC 2025. His second major technical book after the MusicKit ebook.
He won a writing competition at university before anyone knew him as an engineer. The writer and the coder have always been the same person.
He maintains two GitHub accounts - rudrankriyam (935 followers, 152 repos) and rryam (105 followers, 22 packages). Different tools, different audiences, same person shipping.
His university tuition was $60 per semester when he won the WWDC scholarship - one of the more dramatic before/after contrasts in Apple developer history.
He was the only scholar from New Delhi in 2019 - out of thousands of applicants from around the world. One of 350 globally, one of 15 from India.
He ported the Qwen 3VL 4B vision model from Python to Swift using MLX - making it accessible for native Apple platform developers without Python dependencies.
His ASC CLI covers 1,200+ App Store Connect API endpoints in a single binary. It was built in Go, not Swift - a deliberate choice for CLI ergonomics over platform loyalty.