Definition of success
This post was written more than 3 years ago. Hence the viewpoint in this article doesn't fully reflect the way I think right now. I'm including it on this website as a homage to my past self
My father brought home a computer set just after the explosion of personal computers in the late 90s. As a teenager boy, I enjoyed exploring different softwares available for various purposes. In grade 8, I began writing basic C codes. Even though I didn’t go that far because of my capabilities then, but it set the grounds for everything that happens later in my life.
I chose to major in Computer Science and Mathematics, unsurprisingly. Back then my definition of success meant something like working at some tech companies in the Bay Area such as Google, Facebook, Palantir, earning a lot of money and later becoming either a venture capitalist or product manager. I have gone under numerous “ideology reformations” in different scenarios, but perhaps one of the most remarkable life events was when I for the first time stepped inside the University of Pennsylvania for PennApps, a hacking competition also known as “hackathon”.
Quick detour here. A hackathon is a competition that lasts for 24–36 hours in which a person has to complete a product that is either a web app, mobile app, or some hardware hacks involving Internet of Things, Arduino, Myo, Intel Edison, Oculus Rift… One cool thing about hackathons is that they are completely free. Free corporate swag (shirts, pajama pants, pens, stickers). Free food (Halal, Indian, Asian… You name it, it will be there). Even free travel (they pay students to attend hackathons). It’s very cool.
When I first came to PennApps, I thought it would turn out a hardcore competition where people stay up all night to do some serious debugging. Well, people do stay up all night at hackathons, and for debugging too, but they do so mostly because they want to live, to laugh and to cry with what they do. On every corner I went, I caught the glimpse of passionate hackers who continuously talked about the newest features of JavaScript ES6, or the non-stop typing sound of keyboards. At dinners, people would stand in the line and pitch about what they were working on, be it a Slack bot or some kind of machine learning-powered mobile app that would help you eat your meal in the most correct way (I seriously don’t know how they came up with this actually).
After PennApps, I may have learned the most important thing about technology: software is disruptive. With software, people could change the world or disrupt a whole industry. Think about what Uber did with the taxi industry or Airbnb with the renting marketplace, LinkedIn with professional career service, CapitalOne with banking, Slack with in-team communication. Also thousands of tech startups, VC firms and accelerators living in San Francisco, Seattle, New York City, Bangalore, Jerusalem. They all want to disrupt everything. Tech people are those of iconoclasts, seeking adversities to challenge everything established. With machine learning, data science, virtual and augmented reality, Internet of Things, and wearables, the world is going to see the most innovative solutions ever to existing problems. The defeat of human before a Go computer marked the beginning of increased artificial intelligence hype. On Github these days, trending repositories are all about Tensorflow artificial neural network or data visualization toolchains. With that in mind, my success definition changes: make something that would be disruptive.
I threw myself into hackathons, coding competitions to meet like-minded peers. I attended startup conferences and pitch events to discuss current technology trends with angel investors, tech entrepreneurs, and software engineers. Every night I would stay up until 3AM to write callback functions in JavaScripts or trying out new modules on the npm library. Every day I read tech blogs on Medium, tech news on Hacker News and TechCrunch, documentation about Redux Saga and MERN, tutorials on Dijkstra and self-balancing trees as well as priority heaps. Google I/O and WWDC become my most anticipated events, instead of Premier League matches. My friends and family are telling me I am living an unbalanced life. Truth be told, I don’t care. I also don’t care if I will ever be working in the Bay Area or not. What I care is what I can do with technology, and how I can unlock different possibilities with softwares. I start to think about different use cases of Internet to solve a community problem. I start browsing Github more, looking for open-source solutions and contribute to some of them with my limited ability. I mentored at different hackathons, helping people learn the basics. In my freshman year I applied to 60 companies in the US, but got rejected by almost all of them. Luckily, I was able to join Grokking Vietnam, an organization looking to empower Vietnamese software engineers to build the next big things, and get an internship at Chopp, a groceries delivery startup utilizing geolocation and real-time databases. Together with Grokking I assist in hosting an event on programming languages and compilers. Different from a year ago, the me of today programs for the sake of community building and devising solutions to different problems. I can’t honestly tell how close I am to “success”, because that does not matter. One tricky thing about success is that people tend to view it as a goal to reach and then forget after achieving it. No, success should stand dynamically between the lines of extreme difficulty and laziness threshold, so that the desire of achieving success lives every single day.
My definition of success may be subject to change in the future, but for right now I would just stick with it.