Shelley Chang was working as a business analyst for a computer company in 2010 when she met Jason Ho through some mutual friends. Ho was tall and slender with a sly smile, and they hit it off right away. A computer programmer, Ho ran his own company from San Francisco. He also loved to travel. Less than a month after they met, Ho surprised Chang by buying a plane ticket to meet her in Taiwan, where she’d temporarily relocated. Soon they were talking about visiting Japan together for four weeks. Chang was a bit apprehensive; they didn’t know each other well. But she decided to take the gamble.

Ho, as it turned out, had a very strict and peculiar itinerary planned. He’s fond of ramen dishes, and to fit as many as possible into their visit to Tokyo, he’d assembled a list of noodle places and plotted them on Google Maps. Then he’d written some custom code to rank the restaurants so they could be sure to visit the best ones as they went sightseeing. It was, he said, a “pretty traditional” algorithmic challenge, of the sort you learn in college. Ho showed Chang the map on his phone. He told her he was planning to keep careful notes about the quality of each meal too. “Oh wow,” she thought, impressed, if a bit wary. “This guy is kind of nuts.”

Ho was also witty, well read, and funny, and the trip was a success. They ate a lot of ramen but also drank beer ringside at a sumo wrestling match, visited the Imperial Palace, and stopped by the hotel where Lost in Translation was filmed. It was the beginning of a seven-year relationship.

Adapted from " Coders : The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World," by Clive Thompson Penguin Press

Oddities like the ramen optimizer have been part of Ho’s daily routines for years. As a kid growing up in Macon, Georgia, Ho owned a Texas Instruments TI-89 calculator, he told me. One day while leafing through the instruction manual, he discovered that the calculator contained a form of the Basic programming language and taught himself enough to painstakingly ­re-create Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda game on the calculator. He learned Java on the computer and, after high school, went to Georgia Tech in Atlanta to study computer science. Abstract algorithmic concepts were interesting enough, but what really got him going was using computers to avoid repetitive labor. “Anytime I have to repeat something over and over,” he told me, “I get bored.”

In his final year of college, Ho started a company that created forums where students studying the same courses at different colleges could answer one another’s questions. But it didn’t amass nearly enough users, so he shut it down. He interviewed at a few companies like Google and Micro­soft but sank into a funk. He didn’t want to work for someone else. As a question of value creation, being an employee was a terrible proposition, he felt. Sure, you earned a check. But most of the value of your labor was captured by the founders, the ones who owned equity. He had the skills to build something, soup to nuts. He just didn’t know what.

A few months later, he stumbled into an idea on a visit home to Macon. He went to Staples on an errand with his dad, a pediatrician who ran his own office. Ho’s father needed to buy two time clocks, those old-school machines where employees insert cards to be stamped with the time they start and stop work for the day. Each clock cost around $300.

Ho was astounded: Had time-clock technology not changed since The Flintstones? “I can’t believe this is still a thing,” he thought. He realized he could quickly cobble together a website that performed the same task, but better: Employees could check in with their phones, and the site would total up the hours automatically. “Don’t buy this time clock,” he told his father. “I’m going to code you one.” Three days later, he had a prototype. His father’s office began using the service and, to Ho’s delight, they loved it. The system was remarkably more efficient than a paper-based time clock.