code = poetry

I know my rants on the poetry required to be human and *ai* are missing the mark with most of you. I haven’t made my case clear enough. Let me try again.

I worked for a small company with a big quarterly contract from one of the largest computer manufacturers in the world. It wasn’t a code-heavy shop. The head of code was actually a poet. It seems .PY and Kerouac go well together. He was a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. And the language of code appealed to his disregard for syntax and word order. It turns out : and ; and , mean very different things in different programming languages. But as he said, “I studied the code of my employer like an editor. This word, this structure, this goes into this to become something new. And Cheetah templates. That was the other magic trick of code and no-code and low-code, the templates.

A gentle Buddhist, T was someone I wanted to spend time with. Not so much his partner in crime, the more business side of the business. A bit of an evangelist of opportunity and good Christian faith. The two men didn’t often agree, but they agreed as they saw their mutual employer spiraling toward *End of Line.*

They pulled the ripcord, were sued unsuccessfully, and rewrote all of the 1s and 0s in Python with Cheetah templates. They, oh, there was a second programmer, R, who worked alongside T, pair programming, they called it. It was the dawn of Agile and Web 2.o and Scrum and we dove in headfirst. I became a scrum master in a company of ten. We improved our velocity, upped our quality, and worked together as a team that actually cared about each other.

Dell re-orged, as they do, and we lost our champion. We had six more weeks of money. All communications to X, our new conduit were dead. He didn’t respond to emails or phone calls. No back channels were open. And in March of 2007 our team was scattered to the winds at the beginning of SXSW where Twitter was announced. We all tweeted like mad. Mostly to find a job. I don’t remember what my first Twitter handle was. Today I have several, but their value is dropping like XXXs.

Anyway, back to the poetry part. This man, the poet bodhisattva is still wandering the planet trying to do good, write clean code, and an occasional song. His kids are grown. His marriage over. His hair, also gone, very Sidhartha-like.

And he codes on. I haven’t spoken with T for years. We exchange an occasional “thumbs up” on Facebook posts. That’s about all our team has left. Facebook. I lost my German writer friend by making a snide comment she didn’t like. Unfriended. I lost the other coder to disinterest and the pace of life and earning a living as a parent. And the godly man, he’s doing fine. Our team was remarkable for the trust we established and fueled with our daily standups and genuine care for one another.

In a funny moment, our historic building had AC problems. In the heat of an August day in Texas, the air became stale, still, and warm. We relocated to a local Peet’s Coffee in the nearby Frost Tower and carried on with our work. This was a full nine months before the axe would fall. We were stressed about the office, enlivened by the coffee and coffee shop bustle, and we pressed on with our code and marketing and lead generation for Dell. But it was the code = poetry part that I will never forget. That and the trust.