For coders, efficiency is more than just a tool for business. But with software, there’s something else going on too. Capitalism handsomely rewards anyone who can improve a process and squeeze some margin out. There’s one obvious reason, of course: They do it because of the dictates of the market. And maybe you’ve wondered, why the heck is that? Why do techies insist that things should be sped up, torqued, optimized? The thrust of Silicon Valley is always to take human activity and shift it into metabolic overdrive. Whatever you were doing before-hailing a cab, gossiping with a friend, buying toothpaste-now happens faster. Technological innovators generally boast that their services change the world or make life more convenient, but underpinning everything they do is speed. You’ve seen Facebook swallow the public sphere, Uber overhaul urban transportation, Instagram supercharge selfie culture, and Amazon drop off your shopping within 24 hours. Like any sentient person, you’ve noticed that software is eating the world, to use venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s famous phrase. “Anytime I have to repeat something over and over, I get bored.” Cayce Clifford
Jason Ho, founder of Clockspot, tries to make his life activities more efficient with code. It was the beginning of a seven-year relationship. They ate a lot of ramen but also drank beer ringside at a sumo wrestling match, visited the Imperial Palace, and stopped by the hotel where Lost in Translation was filmed. Ho was also witty, well read, and funny, and the trip was a success. “Oh wow,” she thought, impressed, if a bit wary. He told her he was planning to keep careful notes about the quality of each meal too. It was, he said, a “pretty traditional” algorithmic challenge, of the sort you learn in college. Then he’d written some custom code to rank the restaurants so they could be sure to visit the best ones as they went sightseeing. He’s fond of ramen dishes, and to fit as many as possible into their visit to Tokyo, he’d assembled a list of noodle places and plotted them on Google Maps. Ho, as it turned out, had a very strict and peculiar itinerary planned. Chang was a bit apprehensive they didn’t know each other well. Soon they were talking about visiting Japan together for four weeks. Less than a month after they met, Ho surprised Chang by buying a plane ticket to meet her in Taiwan, where she’d temporarily relocated. A computer programmer, Ho ran his own company from San Francisco. Ho was tall and slender with a sly smile, and they hit it off right away. Shelley Chang was working as a business analyst for a computer company in 2010 when she met Jason Ho through some mutual friends.
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