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Several were on full display in a Quora thread where coders talked about automating everyday life. “I got tired of hearing ‘You never message me’ from friends and family,” as one wrote, so he created a script that would randomly send a text to one of them, created using a Mad Libs–style mash-up. (A…

Eventually, of course, that orientation has a way of bleeding into your everyday life. It becomes hard to turn off, like X-ray vision. “Most engineers I know go through life seeing inefficiencies everywhere,” as Christina, a coder in San Francisco, once told me. “Inefficiencies boarding your planes…

The upshot is that most coders arrive at the same logic, which we could summarize thusly: (a) Doing things repeatedly or at the same time every day is boring, and I’m terrible at it. By contrast, (b) slavishly and meticulously doing the same task again and again is easy for the deathless machine si…

Programmers are obsessed with efficiency. It is the one thing I’ve encountered in essentially every coder I’ve met. Coders might be wildly diverse in other ways—politically, socially, culturally, what have you. But nearly every one found deep, almost soulful pleasure in taking something inefficient…

She had also, in the two years they’d been together, discovered that Ho’s obsessive habit of optimizing everything could leak into almost every part of his life. When he decided to buy a house, he didn’t want to sit around going house by house and pondering whether to buy it. So he wrote a little p…