Act I

March 2018. San Francisco.

David Chen bought a used laptop from a guy on Craigslist for eighty dollars. It was a Dell, four years old, with a cracked screen protector and a keyboard that stuck on the E key. He did not care. He opened a book on Python programming and began to read.

His friend had told him to learn to code. "It's the future," his friend said. David did not believe in futures. He believed in coffee and buses and the particular quality of light that came through his apartment window at four in the afternoon. But he bought the book anyway.

His first program was stupid. It was a shopping list—something to help him remember to buy milk and eggs and the cheap bread he ate instead of breakfast. He typed it on the cracked laptop, ran it, and watched as the program displayed his list on the screen. It was the most exciting thing he had ever seen.

Act II

2019. David got a job as a backend developer at a small startup in SoMa. He wrote APIs. He fixed bugs. He sat in meetings where people used words like "synergy" and "bandwidth" and nodded because nodding was easier than explaining that he did not know what they meant.

He lived in a studio apartment in the Mission. He cooked pasta. He walked to work. He came home and watched television and went to sleep.

2020. The pandemic came. David worked from home. He sat in the same chair he had sat in as a student, looking at the same cracked screen, writing code that kept a company's servers running while the world stopped outside his window.

He did not feel brave. He did not feel important. He felt tired.

2021. David wrote a small tool. It automated a task that ten of his colleagues hated—copying data from one system to another, a process that took each of them twenty minutes a day. David's tool did it in three seconds. He posted it on the company's internal forum and forgot about it.

A week later, a woman named Lisa messaged him. Thank you, she wrote. This thing you made—it saved my weekends. I can actually go home now.

David replied with a smiley face emoji. That was all he knew how to say.

Act III

2022. David left Silicon Valley.

He did not give a grand speech. He did not write a resignation letter full of passion and purpose. He emailed his manager and said he was leaving, and when his manager asked why, David said he wanted to teach, and his manager said okay and David thought that was the most honest conversation he had ever had in a corporate office.

He moved to Portland. He found a job teaching computer science at a community college in Southeast Portland, where the buildings were old and the students were tired and the coffee at the campus cafe was terrible.

On his first day, he stood in front of a classroom of twenty students and said something that was not a quote from a book or a famous person. It was just something he said.

"Every line of code changes the world," he told them. "Even if it only changes one person's way of working."

He did not expect anyone to remember that. He said it and moved on to the lecture, which was about variables and data types and the difference between a string and an integer.

Act IV

2024. David Chen died of lung cancer at thirty-four.

Twenty people came to the funeral. His sister Anna spoke. She said he was quiet and that he did not understand why people made such a big deal out of birthdays. She said he drank too much coffee and that his favorite color was the gray of a San Francisco fog.

After the funeral, Anna went home and found a box of David's things. In the box was a USB drive and a note: If you find this, there's a program on here that helps people find jobs. Keep it updated. It's not much, but it helps.

Anna did not know how to code. She emailed the program to a friend who worked at a workforce development center in Portland. The friend updated it and put it online.

In 2030, a woman named Emily Chen (no relation) used the program to help her find her first job after college. She did not know who David Chen was. She did not know that the tool she used on her first day of work had been written by a man who had died six years earlier, a man who had sat in a cracked-laptop apartment in San Francisco and written a shopping list because he wanted to remember to buy milk.

Emily became a software engineer. In 2035, she invented a data compression algorithm that changed how information was stored across the internet. In the comments of her first major code commit, she wrote a single line:

致敬 David Chen, my first programming teacher.

She did not know him. She did not need to. His code was enough.

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