I want to tell about Daisy, who is a social studies teacher in the Dominican Republic, and Amanda, who is my sister. Daisy had never touched a computer until the fall of 2003 when she enrolled in my Informática para maestros class in Cabrera, the town where I worked as a Peace Corps volunteer. She fell in love with computers, became crazy about computers, but didn't have any real possibilities for owning a computer. Like most Dominican teachers, she didn't make a lot of money. So when Amanda came to visit me in the spring of 2004, I told her to bring a computer for Daisy. It was an old computer with a 133 mhz processor and 32 megabytes of memory which was just adequate for installing Windows 98 in Spanish and not of enough monetary value to worry about it getting fried by the haywire Dominican electrical system. It was perfect.

What wasn't perfect was that Daisy had no money for software, and neither did I. So here was this sweet little computer with an operating system and nothing else. Fortunately, I had been in that situation before, back when commercial software barely existed and everyone wrote their own code. I remembered how when I was a school kid my father programmed our TRS-80 (with 16 K of memory!) to give multiplication tests to my sister and me. He had written the program in BASIC and it would tell him afterwards how many problems we had gotten right or wrong. So I thought: no software, no problem, I'll just write whatever Daisy needs. It so happened that Daisy had a son, Tato, in the fourth grade. He was learning his multiplication tables. So I went to work to make Daisy's computer give Tato a little math quiz.

I wrote the quiz as a web page so that it could run in any free browser. After I made the multiplication quiz, it was pretty obvious to see that the computer could manufacture addition, subtraction and division questions just as easily. Thus, the arithmetic quiz was born, in Spanish, on a 133 mhz processor in the Dominican Republic. For the record, Tato hated it. He was pretty excited when we told him there was something for him to do on the computer, and extremely annoyed when he found out it had to do with math. He threw a temper tantrum. He kicked and screamed and said we had better install Mortal Kombat very soon or he was going to destroy the computer. It was not an auspicious beginning.

Because Tato refused to use it and I didn't want to see my code go to waste, I installed the arithmetic quiz on every single computer at the school where I worked. I realized that I could do even better than that. Since it was a web page after all, it was no problem to make it accessible to any school in the world. When you write good code, you want people to use it.

Back in the United States the next summer, working on a math testing program was not my highest priority at all. I was desperate to find a job. I didn't have much money and I was planning to pay for a masters degree in Spanish out of my savings. I hunted and hunted for any kind of short term computer work. If I had found anything, I would have put all my energy into someone else's software all summer. But no one would hire me, and I started to think more and more about electronic math testing and how simple and convenient it would be to record grades in a database instead of simply showing them on the screen. Although I never admitted it to the artistic and outdoorsy girlfriends of my youth, I enjoy writing code very much. Designing software well is a great puzzle: you have to figure out how to do things so everything works cleanly and efficiently and fast. It's one of the things which I'm best at.

The math testing website turned out to be quite a success. During the school year I discovered that people were using it in growing numbers. I kept making improvements during the winter because I knew once I finished graduate school I would really have to get a job that paid something so that I could eat. This was no joke. Probably none of the teachers who visited my site imagined that it was written single-handedly by a guy who could not afford to buy fruit at the grocery store because it just cost too much. The sad part of this story is that I like fruit a lot. Every time I went by the oranges and grapes I would put some in my cart, but then right before checking out I would do the math in my head and realize I couldn't afford them, and I'd have to go put them back on the shelf.

I finished graduate school in May and put myself on the job market immediately. I am a pretty competent software engineer and I ought to be able to make some money doing this work. I actually landed quite a few interviews in the next couple of months. Still, I couldn't find a job. Managers in the technology industry seem to be very skeptical of anyone who is interested in becoming fluent in a second language like Spanish which happens to be used by people instead of machines. If I were such a great software engineer, they said, I would have spent the last eight years in a cubicle with a 32-bit processor. Teaching Dominican kids the rudiments of Java and studying Spanish literature because you like it do not fit into their picture of a model employee. My two years spent teaching math in Nepal, in a village without electricity, never turns out to be much of a selling point either.

Sometimes I get emails from ThatQuiz users who want to know if I am going to start charging money for using it. Although I am not enough of a business person to venture that way, I have to admit that the question of public service vs. income generation goes a long way back. When I registered the domain name, I couldn't decide between being a dot-org or a dot-com. I registered both names to be safe. Now for reasons related mainly to Google search, dot-com is the way we are and the way we will be. Many more people linked to the dot-com domain name, which meant that the dot-org name simply got lost.

Occasionally I've even received emails berating me in advance for whatever money I might one day make from this work. It's pretty funny because they probably come from people who can afford to buy all the oranges they want at the supermarket, while I sure can't. My heart is split on the issue. On the one hand I am really poor and unemployed. I recently married a beautiful European woman who is not accustomed to penury in any way, and moreover is a capitalist. We are living off her limited savings while I test the European job market for a change (it hasn't been any more promising). Married life would be easier for both of us if we had a little more of a bank account.

On the other hand, you can't always measure success with a dollar amount. My original goal of making a math test for Tato has been met and exceeded beyond what I ever imagined, and my software design skills are now the sharpest they have ever been. Perhaps the best measure of success would be based on the original purpose: to provide useful, quality software to people with limited financial resources. In any event, I am happy that I wrote the quiz for Tato, and happy that I kept developing more quizzes when I couldn't find a job, and very happy that every day more people keep using my work.