Replica

by

Oneohtrix Point Never

In 2011 I was working in New York City and living in the suburbs. I had my first job doing web programming, though it was all on the backend, a projection of my insecurities after a half-decade of writing C++ programs that ran on OpenVMS. My team was responsible for figuring out how to unify the Java service-based architecture that had begun to spiral out from the original Rails monolith. An API, a "source of truth". My team was made up of slightly more experienced engineers all based out of our Dublin office (a recently-discovered tax haven for US startups), a manager from America who had moved there some years ago ahead of the curve, and me, the dummy at headquarters.

Quickly my manager came up with the idea of me working on a Public API, which would be a simpler interface and a good way to test out the real goal my team had: to ignore the Java architecture and practices that had begun to solidify and instead build the API in Scala.

We rushed a "Public API" into production and I found myself in the role of unofficial "evangelist" (a term we used at the time, unfortunately; nowadays we'd call it "devrel" or similar). I attended hackathons as a company representative, trying to convince uninterested college students to use our extremely basic API for a flash sale site they may have seen a subway ad for once.

One night I went to the MongoDB hackathon, an overnight hackathon in their extremely dreary, warehouse-like office. As a self-professed night owl, I thought it would be a piece of cake, but it was a particularly dead event in terms of my ability to find anyone who gave a shit about what I was offering. I started to feel pretty miserable. I retreated into the weird offset corner where they had set up a sad little sectional couch area with a TV. The lights in the "room" were out. I curled up in a little ball on the couch and listened to "Replica" in its entirety, a sort of weird fever dream of an experience. If you can shiver slightly in the fetal position while you listen to "Up!", you can begin to understand how I feel about this album.