Ajisashi

There's a café I go to every day.
It only serves light roasts.
The espresso tastes different from day to day.
It changes with the person making it, too.
Does it change with the air as well?

I love coffee. I've been hand-dripping it for about six years,
because someday I'd like to open a place of my own.

Looking back, it may have started when I founded my software company and wanted the caffeine I couldn't live without to be good and cheap.
Obsess over one thing, study it, master it.
Then talk about it together.
When you start a company, sharing time with everyone matters a lot. Coffee connects people.

Hacking is the same.
You face it every day, tune it, and fix it when something breaks.
Sometimes an idea just strikes,
like when you're prototyping one protocol and suddenly think of a different way to do a UDP protocol.
Programs connect people too.

Maybe the spirit of a hacker and the spirit of a barista are actually alike.

Then I had a strange experience.

I never really liked alcohol.
When I drink, I loosen up.
Come to think of it, I had barely loosened up at all since starting the company.
I'm always thinking.

How do I notify every peer of the UUIDs cached in Redis?
How do I use gRPC streams and schemas to communicate asynchronously and type-safely?
Whatever I'm doing, thoughts like these never leave my head.

The café I go to turns into a bar at night.
When work runs late, I sometimes stop by in the evening.
That's how I got to know two bartenders, and they made me cocktails.

The sound of ice shaking in the shaker.
The taste of fresh fruit.
Balancing alcohol, a liquid with a different weight than water.
The rhythm of each shake.

Every time a different taste, with reproducibility close to zero.
Delicious.
I started to like drinking.

They work every day to make their recipes more reproducible, so that people will find them delicious.

A program is 100% reproducible, as long as the spec doesn't change.

Their spec changes every day.

The fruit at the supermarket.
The humidity in the bar.
The temperature.
Their own palate that day.
The guest's palate.

They take on a world with far more variables than mine.
I came to respect them.

Do bartenders share the same spirit as hackers?
I'm truly happy that I get to find the answer as I grow through life.

And now he and she have moved on,
off to new horizons, I suppose.

If I ever write a good program, it's at least partly thanks to you.

skål.