A viral app

In summer 2021, being locked down in Ho Chi Minh City during the pandemic, I was spending all days and nights drawing Figma designs, writing code, and conducting usability tests. A program was being developed with the goal of making selecting courses at my university easier. Finally, right before my birthday that year, an app called OneSchedule—named after a then-immature school-owned portal named OneStop—was released to the community. It was received with a warm welcome from the 400-person student body. Hundreds of users sessions were measured on Google Analytics a peak times, equally many gratitude reactions received on social media, together with plenty of donations, drove me and my teammates to (lowkey) stardom within the school.

After we graduated in 2023, the app was fortunately maintained by another student. Recently, after 4 years of serving the student body, the core maintainer told us that the maintenance is no longer needed. The school’s OneStop portal has become mature and subsumed our offerings. OneSchedule’s mission was fulfilled during those 4 years. In a donation note to the app in 2023, a friend said, “Thank you for lifting up pains for so many people.” That period of building and delivering the app remains one of the most rewarding experiences in my programming career.

Science

After that, my focus has shifted to a scientific career. In graduate school, my study has been rewarding: I started to publish more papers, some at prestigious venues; my track record landed me an internship; and being in the US allowed me to see its cultures and liberty. However, now as I think about OneSchedule, working with technologies is not bringing me the same level of happiness as it once did. In research, I interacted with far fewer people. Since there is a long time for research findings to actually be implemented for the public, I have never been able to see anyone benefiting from my papers. My field, called artificial intelligence, risks replacing up to half of lower-income jobs by unevenly distributing its benefits to the richest people. My community is packed with inflated publication records and overly-excited entrepreneurs. All of these make me wonder: what do I want to spend the next 10 years of my career on?

Don’t get me wrong — I love doing scientific research and I am confident that will continue to be the case. Science, which is often seen as the exploration of universal laws, has a huge return-on-investment, enabling us to understand more deeply about the world we live in and improve lives on a global scale. Given my current skill set, it is the area that I can contribute most profoundly to the world. Also, this field pays me to basically just learn and get wiser, on the premise that I have to report my learnings back to humanity when done. I believe self-motivated learning is intrinsically enjoyable, and that fact is encoded in the Greek origin of the word “philosophy”, i.e., “love of knowledge”

But science is eventually just a tool in our toolkit, much like engineering, empathy or arts. We have the freedom to choose where to deploy our skills that most align with our values. (This is why schools should cultivate human values with intentionality.) Or in engineering language, we are free to choose what problems to solve. That is an important question that we should never forget. However, we don’t have to have the answer right away. In fact, I think there is no right or wrong answer to it.

Social entrepreneurship

My friends and I selling near-expiry-date food from supermarkets on the street. April 2021

My parents used to live in below-average financial status. Luckily, they gave me both love and an excellent education, arguably far beyond what most of their peers can give their kids. I don’t know how they did that.

Later on, when I went to college, an elder classmate told me a profound statement: “You will eventually be rich enough to have the material life you want, so don’t worry too much about money.” It is as profound as Daniel Kahneman’s Money will stop bringing happiness. My friend didn’t pull that out of thin air, but based on his own experience of a much tougher past and how he sees our growing trajectories during our own time in college. I keep coming back to that saying, especially these days.

Recently, I saw an interview with Po-Shen Loh, a famous CMU mathematician (on skills that are not replaceable by AI). There, he defined “social entrepreneurs” as those who decide that they don’t want to be that rich. So instead of optimizing for money, they optimize for impact. To Dr. Loh, helping people around himself is the happiest thing we can possibly do in his life.

This mission resonates quite deeply with me. It explains why building OneSchedule was more fun than having another publication. And it shows a pathway for me to continue to do science in a way that brings me constant enjoyment instead of resentment, meaning instead of glamour.

I know life won’t be that simple. Everyone wants to be a kind person, but not everyone has the capacity to hold kindness. But if what that college friend told me is true, which I am already experience it, then I at least know what I want to do while saying no to other stuffs.

Lastly, let me end with an example idea of what I want to do:

  • A serial engineering team (such as an app studio) that creates technology solutions that really solve lower-middle-income class really need. For Vietnam and Southeast Asia. Maybe towards the UN development goals. A team where the first thing they think about is not how much profit an idea can give, or when to break even, but how to create a long-lasting positive impact to the underprivileged. Therefore, instead of finding use cases where money can be made, they can just grab any life-threatening problems and think about solutions for them.
    • There will be very very difficult and complex problems to do research on, such as how to relieve such as salinity intrusion in the Mekong delta, or technologies for natural disasters in tropical areas. Those are where scientists shine!
    • There will of course be engineering challenges.
    • There will also be tremendous opportunities for education within the organization. Newbies come to learn technical stuff. They learn, create impact, get jobs thanks to it, and stay to educate the next generations.
  • The primary source of money will come from the growing amount of philanthropy money, such as the Gates Foundation, where Bill Gates pledged to [give away all his wealth ($200b) in the next 20 years] to “the cause of saving and improving lives around the world”. Even with a lot of money, it is not that easy to give to the right place (thus the whole field of effective altruism). Is it hard? Yes. Can we win the grants? We should, because it is perhaps equally hard to get grants in academia anyway, and many of us could have done a good job there.
  • And if the money doesn’t work out yet, we will operate as hobbyists and volunteers. It is not a typical volunteering job that drains us out. This job solves problems that matter to our relatives at home. And it trains us to be better at our own technical skills. We make everything public because it will be a blessing if someone copies our solutions and implements them for their communities. Our social entrepreneur track records will convincingly show people how decent capabilities are and give us better full-time jobs, which allows us to contribute even more back to the community.

Pardon my naivete — I know reality will be much harder than my blogging about it. My job here is to learn how to be realistic. At the end of the day, I just want to help.

Side node: OneSchedule’s source is open-sourced since day 1 at https://github.com/npnkhoi/oneschedule.