Thread by @revin

Lemme tell you about the most successful program I ever wrote

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A few years ago, as our wedding anniversary was approaching, I was drawing a blank trying to come up with a good gift for my wife

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She's great at giving good gifts, so I tried to match. Tried to come up with something that nobody else on earth would know to do for her

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I decided some type of computing related thing that hits her real world tastes would be good, and very "me"

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After much thought I bought her a series of gifts, most smallish, but a few good sized things. Stuff I knew she would enjoy.

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Made a scavenger hunt; hid the stuff around the house & wrote a bunch of clues. A few were video clips of the kids providing verbal clues

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The software side: at one point, she got a text message from "Annie the Robot", a contact I'd added to her phone

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It introduced itself & told her it'd be helping her celebrate the day & to reply with START. She finished a few chores, then began

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It would send a clue, she'd go find the gift. She's a big Jane Austen fan so the first thing was a flowery Regency style love letter

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Every gift had a little card with it with an Austen quote and a keyword. Text it back to Annie, fun reply; some time later, another clue

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Halfway through, she knocked on my office door (I work remotely); was something wrong? Not that I could see (Annie sent me logging)

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She had tears in her eyes. I was panic stricken for a brief moment. Turns out she wasn't upset, just utterly moved.

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She hugged me and said thanks and said it was the best present she'd ever received; the whole thing was just perfectly "us"

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She wanted to know how it all worked. I said go ahead and finish it; I'd fill her in when I was done with work for the day

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I'd been a professional software developer for well over a decade at this point, and I was feeling big time impostor syndrome over this

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The entire thing was a big ugly PHP script talking to the Twilio API. Almost no error checking. Duplicated code everywhere

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The kind of thing the most toxic elements of our industry would love to just shred so they could feel superior

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I was embarrassed by it. Half this program was a big static data structure holding the keywords & responses & timing confugration

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It wasn't object oriented, it wasn't even procedural. Just a big set of imperative steps. I should be better than this, right?

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Anyway, all of that completely melted away as soon as I saw her reaction

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It was the first time I genuinely understood that users don't care how something is implemented; they care how it makes them feel

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It was an unexpected milestone in my career. I leveled up as a programmer that day. 22/22