Making the heart drool

Over twenty-two years of making a living by writing letters in software, and every letter I put down still feels hard. At sixteen, fumbling out my first words in Pascal, it felt impossibly heavy; at forty-two, writing my two- or three-millionth word, it feels slightly less heavy. Why does this engineering job require you to be good at language? Everything you touch, you have to name. When the neighbors gave you a puppy and you got to name it, that was thrilling — you named it so you could love and care for it. Let alone a lifeless, emotionless machine, and the indented lines of code with hundreds of codes and hints you have to remember — and you have to name every one of them. More demanding than any teacher who made you write your letters straight and in neat rows, tracing every diacritic, because all it takes is one missing dot or comma and you'll dig around for a month not understanding what went wrong, while the customer who has the money can't use your software to cure his illness for another round...

I don't understand why it has to be this hard to build something as important as software — the tools that help people. Could we not do it at all? Not yet. So find the easiest way to make the best product.

Over the long haul, this job turns us into cold-hearted engineers, easily annoyed and snappy, and worse when we also carry a little injured pride. I put in so much effort just to get words out to this machine — those who've loved unrequitedly and think they have it rough, try loving a machine! Not to mention you also have to love the dry, brittle stuff your predecessors left behind — we just call it shoveling shit. So I often say for a laugh: he's gone into Chí Phèo mode again, writing and cursing at the same time. That's okay, though — Chí Phèo cursed like mad, but he also loved a lot. He'll love once he understands that the machine is just a tool for bringing love to another person — the one who uses it.

It's hard to see the hidden meaning behind the beautiful and the ugly action.

Yesterday was yesterday. Today is different.

The arrogance, the ox-cart-sized egos, the disloyalty, the greed of my fellow word-writers-for-a-living now have no ground left to stand on. It's not as if I wasn't waiting for this day. The day when people who write software get pushed into the same position as the motorbike taxi driver who ripped me off — a provincial student coming up to the city to visit my very sick mother — to squeeze an extra ten thousand đồng out of me back in 2001. That driver was trying to take as much as possible from someone he'd never see again. My own father drove a motorbike taxi too, and he never took money from the old lady who crossed the ferry to the market every morning. The luxury this programming profession has been granted is unjust to society. I see it as the same injustice as soccer players being paid a hundred thousand pounds a week back in 2000. Juan Mata and Paul Scholes saw the injustice too, but they still had to take the money. It's what happens when supply is smaller than demand.

It's over now.

The only ground left is for motorbike taxi drivers with heart. Grab rides too, sure, but on the side. Because shuttling his older daughter to and from places four times a day already eats up his time. Every so often he buys worms for his fish, and when his buddy is out drinking he rides the bike home to keep him safe. That's love. Now you have to put the human soul into the product. Not just now — it's always had to be this way. Luckily, now it's the only option. The trick is: how do you infuse heart and soul into a lifeless thing and reach the level that I crudely describe as — using the software makes you drool from sheer pleasure. Get there, and you'll succeed.