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“Anytime I have to repeat something over and over,” he told me, “I get bored.” In his final year of college, he decided that the whole structure of the college system was weirdly inefficient: You had kids taking basically the same classes at different institutions, often with the same lessons, runn…

Ho, as it turned out, had a very strict and peculiar itinerary planned for the trip. He’s particularly fond of ramen-noodle dishes, and his goal on this jaunt, he told her, was to visit as many Tokyo ramen shops as possible. To make sure they crammed in as many as they could, he’d created some cust…

In 1976, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum proclaimed that programmers were becoming defective in empathy, because they spent too much time in a tight loop with the machine. Weizenbaum had worked at MIT since the ’60s, and wandered into the AI lab, where he’d beheld the unkempt and often-fra…

Many coders write “on the page,” as it were, working line by line, function by function, testing bits and slowly building up the program. Cohen back in 2004 wasn’t doing this. He’d wander around all day long lost in his head, pondering the weird timing issues of far-flung BitTorrent peers, modeling…

“I tell people, you always take pride in your code. You should always be refactoring it, it should look like you’ve been working on it, when people see it,” he said. A single flabbily written function would convey something other than total commitment to the craft. “I’m a firm believer in the broke…