For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
For thirty years I programmed with Phish on, every day
三十年来，我每天都在听着 Phish 的音乐中编程
Someone on the Phish Facebook group reposted a TikTok overdub. Vanessa Bayer and Paul Rudd at a lunch table, losing their minds to a song while their coworkers stare. The original was Fleetwood Mac. Whoever made it swapped in “Down With Disease.” That move is Phish fans in miniature. Someone cared enough about the song and the bit that they rebuilt a piece of pop culture around the band. That’s how the scene works. People spend their time doing things like this for free, because the music asks for it.
Phish 的 Facebook 群组里有人转发了一段 TikTok 配音视频。视频中，Vanessa Bayer 和 Paul Rudd 在午餐桌旁，对着一首歌疯狂沉醉，而同事们则在一旁盯着他们看。原版视频用的是 Fleetwood Mac 的歌，但制作这段视频的人将其换成了“Down With Disease”。这种行为是 Phish 粉丝群体的缩影——有人因为太在意这首歌和这个梗，以至于围绕这支乐队重构了一段流行文化。这就是这个圈子的运作方式：人们愿意花时间免费做这些事，因为音乐本身就要求如此。
For thirty years, that was me at my desk. I used to make a joke that if I ever had to interview for a new job, I’d need to ask the interviewer to put Phish on so I could actually program for them. I’d say it as a joke, because saying it straight would have made it sound deranged. But it wasn’t a joke. After three decades, the cue and the state had fused. I could not, with any reliability, get into the zone without the music. The conditioning was complete and I knew it. I would make the joke and people would laugh, and I would laugh too, and underneath that we both knew I was telling the truth.
三十年来，我坐在书桌前也是如此。我过去常开玩笑说，如果我要去面试新工作，我得要求面试官播放 Phish 的音乐，我才能真正为他们编程。我把它当成笑话来说，因为如果直说，听起来会像个疯子。但那并不是玩笑。三十年后，这种音乐暗示与工作状态已经融为一体。没有音乐，我就无法稳定地进入专注状态。这种条件反射已经根深蒂固，我对此心知肚明。我会开这个玩笑，大家会笑，我也会跟着笑，但在笑声之下，我们彼此都心知肚明：我说的是实话。
I got into Phish in 1995. By then I had already been programming for years, self-taught. In 1998 I got my first professional job in tech. I was 15. Around that time I also tried to get a normal teenage job. There was a grocery store near my house and I went in to apply, figuring I could bag groceries on weekends like everybody else. They turned me down. Not because I was too young or too inexperienced. They told me I was overqualified. A 15 year old kid with programming on his application was, somehow, too much for the grocery store. So I kept programming. There was never any other plan.
我是在 1995 年开始听 Phish 的。那时我已经自学编程好几年了。1998 年，我得到了第一份科技行业的工作，当时我才 15 岁。那段时间，我也尝试过找一份普通的青少年工作。我家附近有一家杂货店，我去应聘，想着能像其他人一样在周末打包杂货。但他们拒绝了我。不是因为我太年轻或缺乏经验，而是因为他们说我“资历过高”。一个在申请表上写着会编程的 15 岁孩子，对杂货店来说似乎太“超标”了。于是我继续编程。我从未有过其他计划。
All I ever wanted to do was listen to Phish and program. That was the whole list. It didn’t have qualifiers. It didn’t have a third thing I sometimes wanted instead. There was no balance I was striving for. There was the music and the code, and there wasn’t anything else competing for the space. I was blessed enough to be able to make a career out of it. For thirty years, the thing I most wanted to do was the thing I got paid for. That isn’t true for most people, and I knew it then, and I know it now.
我唯一想做的就是听着 Phish 编程。这就是我的全部清单。它没有附加条件，也没有我偶尔想要的其他选项。我不需要追求什么平衡。只有音乐和代码，没有其他东西来争夺我的空间。我很幸运，能以此为生。三十年来，我最想做的事情就是我赖以谋生的工作。这对大多数人来说并不现实，我当时明白，现在也明白。
Other kids my age were figuring out what they liked, trying things on, growing into and out of phases. I was watching them do it from a desk. I had picked early. I started writing code as a kid. I heard Phish for the first time at thirteen. By the time I was fifteen and had a professional gig, the picking was settled. I had two things, and I didn’t want a third. If I had a free Friday night, I knew what I was doing with it. If I had a long weekend, I knew what I was doing with it. If a holiday came up, I knew what I was doing with it. The activity didn’t change. The output changed, the project changed, the song changed, but the shape of the time was constant.
同龄的孩子们还在探索自己的喜好，尝试各种事物，经历不同的阶段。而我只是坐在书桌前看着他们。我早早就做出了选择。我从小就开始写代码，13 岁第一次听到 Phish。到 15 岁获得第一份专业工作时，我的选择已经定型。我有两样东西，不需要第三样。如果周五晚上有空，我知道自己要做什么；如果有个长周末，我知道自己要做什么；如果遇到假期，我也知道自己要做什么。活动内容从未改变。产出变了，项目变了，歌曲变了，但时间的形态始终如一。
For the next three decades, that’s what it stayed. I would put on Phish and write code. That was the day. That was the night. It was my job, and it was also my hobby, and there was no seam between them. The work I did in that state was the work I am most proud of. Distributed systems. Backend services. The hard stuff that needs you to hold a lot in your head at once and stay there. Phish is a band that rewards you for staying in one place for a long time. The jams are long. The compositions unfold. If you give it an hour, it gives you something back. That matched the shape of the work exactly.
在接下来的三十年里，情况一直如此。我会播放 Phish 的音乐，然后写代码。这就是白天，这就是夜晚。这是我的工作，也是我的爱好，两者之间没有界限。在这种状态下完成的工作，是我最引以为傲的。分布式系统、后端服务——这些硬核工作需要你同时在脑海中处理大量信息并保持专注。Phish 是一支奖励那些能长时间保持专注的听众的乐队。他们的即兴演奏很长，乐曲层层展开。如果你投入一小时，它就会给你相应的回馈。这与我的工作形态完全契合。
Before grad school, I had a day job at Berklee College of Music writing music software, and night classes at Northeastern. I’d take the 12:00 AM train home. I’d put Junta on as I sat down. Most nights I’d fall asleep to it before the train pulled in. (This might be why I love “Foam” so much.) I was in graduate school for a decade. The bulk of the dissertation, more than two hundred pages by the end, got written between 2021 and 2023, after I came back to Pittsburgh from Europe. I was too poor to travel to shows. So I planned nights of couch tour. There was a live stream. I would set it up on one screen and write on the other.
读研之前，我白天在伯克利音乐学院编写音乐软件，晚上在东北大学上课。我常坐午夜 12 点的火车回家。坐下后，我会播放《Junta》这张专辑。大多数夜晚，我会在火车进站前听着它睡着。（这可能就是我为什么那么喜欢《Foam》的原因。）我读了十年研究生。论文的大部分内容（最终超过两百页）是在 2021 年到 2023 年间完成的，那时我刚从欧洲回到匹兹堡。我当时太穷了，没钱去现场看演出，于是我策划了“沙发巡演”之夜。我会打开直播，在一个屏幕上播放演出，在另一个屏幕上写作。
The band would play in Hampton or Alpine Valley or wherever, and I would write about distributed systems while they played, and at some point in the second set the dissertation would crack open a little and I would understand something I had not understood that morning. The dissertation is the longest single thing I made inside that ritual, but it isn’t the only thing. Entire pieces of production software came out of those nights too. Systems that ran for years, handled real load, served real users. Whole systems, from the first commit to the version that shipped. I’d put a show on and stay inside the work until something existed that hadn’t existed when the show started.
乐队在汉普顿、高山谷或其他任何地方演出，而我在他们演奏时撰写关于分布式系统的论文。在第二组曲目的某个时刻，论文的思路会突然豁然开朗，我能理解早上还没弄懂的东西。这篇论文是我在这种仪式感中完成的最长的作品，但绝非唯一。许多完整的生产级软件也是在这些夜晚诞生的。这些系统运行了多年，处理了真实的负载，服务了真实的用户。从第一次提交代码到最终发布版本，整个系统都是如此。我会播放一场演出，沉浸在工作中，直到演出结束时，创造出一些原本不存在的东西。
I have listened to Phish every day since I was fifteen. Every day. The years I lived in Europe earlier in graduate school, where going to a show meant flying back across an ocean, I listened. I would sit at my desk in another country and put on a show from the nineties and code. I have listened to certain shows so many times that I can sing the solos back, note by note, without thinking about it. Boardwalk Hall Halloween. NYE 1995. Trey will play a phrase and my mouth will already be ahead of him. I felt lucky. I still feel lucky. There aren’t many people who get to spend thirty years inside the thing they loved at fifteen.
从 15 岁起，我每天都在听 Phish。每一天。早些年我在欧洲读研时，去看一场演出意味着要跨越大洋飞回去，但我依然在听。我坐在异国的书桌前，播放着九十年代的演出录音，然后写代码。有些演出我听过太多次，以至于我可以不假思索地逐音符唱出其中的独奏。比如 Boardwalk Hall 的万圣节演出，或是 1995 年的新年夜。Trey 弹出一个乐句，我的嘴就已经先于他唱出来了。我感到很幸运。我现在依然觉得很幸运。没几个人能像我这样，在 15 岁时爱上的事物中度过三十年。
Since January, the work has changed. I don’t really write code anymore. The main thing now is managing agents. I open a session, ask a question, redirect, switch to a different one, check on a merge, review what came back, send it back for changes, switch again. The day is a queue. Things finish at different times and require different responses, and the responses are short and the contexts are constantly different. This is engineering. I keep being told that. It is engineering and it is the future and it is more leveraged than what I used to do. All of that is probab…
从一月开始，工作内容变了。我不再真正写代码了。现在的主要工作是管理 AI 代理。我打开一个会话，提出问题，重定向，切换到另一个，检查合并，审查反馈，发回修改，再次切换。我的一天变成了一个队列。任务在不同时间完成，需要不同的响应，响应很短，上下文也时刻在变。这就是工程。人们一直这样告诉我。这是工程，这是未来，而且比我过去做的事情更具杠杆效应。所有这些大概都是……