Who is David Pham?

I am a senior data privacy engineer at a newspaper here in Washington, DC. I'm a self-taught web developer. I have a non-traditional background. Instead of studying computer science or journalism, I pursued history and sociology. I kind of think history is a way to understanding people over time, and sociology is seeing group behavior of people in respects the systems we've built. I find myself in tech through many late nights of tinkering in Wordpress, php, javascript, angularJS, jQuery, react, html, and css. My success is really through others' help, support, and mentorship that I made it as a professional engineer.

My dad fled Vietnam as a refugee soon after the war. He arrived in the States through a student visa. My mom grew up in the hot deserts of Juarez, Mexico, second youngest of 10. I think about the courage they had to make a life in the States without money, their home culture, and their communities to support them.

Both of my parents are non-native English speakers. They weren't the type of parents to read to me or my sister. And they were not intellectuals, successful business people, or great executives, like my some of my classmates' parents. However, my dad would copy books from the local library on space, dinosaurs, and the like and bring them home to me. My uncle, studying for his test for citizenship, would bring home civics books about basic American governance, history, and values. I recall reading them, obsessively.

As an aside, I have a sense that my language development was deeply influenced by my parents' speaking and writing by ear. I'll admit to you that I was jealous of my classmates in AP English for their ability to write both quickly, eloquently, and vividly. When I am exhausted, sleep deprived, or just old plain tired, I'd would misspell, omit words, and mis-conjugate verbs much more frequently. I didn't see that from my peers. Jealously is a motivator, so it seems.

I often think about the sheer luck of my life when I consider where my parents came from and where I am at today. From that origin, I've managed to carve a space in the tech industry, first of my family to buy a home, and have a family of my own. Although my parents are not intellectuals, they are hard working people just trying to get by. Thinking about ideas is real luxury for them. I feel so lucky that I can.

I bring up the fact that I come from a non-traditional background, whenever I can -- I know -- profoundly insufferable I must be. But I do think history is a very powerful lens to understanding decisions made by powerful individuals and organizations, and how people change through time (or not change, depending on your view). History's constant questions are why and how -- why did society decline so rapidly? Why were people so resist to doing the right thing? Why didn't things change? How was it built or made? Asking these questions is not too different from reviewing code, studying app architecture or drawing system diagrams. I've picked up a slightly above average talent for teaching myself complicated stuff like software engineering through such questions. Note taking on paper helps a lot.

Another aside, bare with me in my indulgence about my studies in history. It is a form of stortelling, if you think about it. The myth we tell ourselves about technology is that we are marching towards the Good by every incremental update. But we possess almost god-like power in summoning magical things: delivery packages in two days or flunetly talking to an arthemetic illeriate calculator (LLMs/AI). Our brains, biologically are no different than humans from 10,000 years ago. Our republic, cities, and civic institutions are only a few hundreds years old. We are speeding our way into the unknown without fully understand what we are building. I feel my history background makes me think more fully about the things we are creating and putting out into the world.Another aside, bare with me in my indulgence about my studies in history. It is a form of storytelling, if you think about it. It's a a model to understanding how things came to be. We do a lot of lying to ourselves and try very hard to make sense of the world. Often, we don't have enough information, but our brains do make up stories to make sense of it.

The myth we tell ourselves about technology is that we are marching towards the future with every incremental update. Yet we don't acknowledge the almost god-like power in summoning magical things: delivery packages arrive in two days or fluently talking to a arithmetic illiterate calculator (LLMs/AI). Our brains, biologically are no different than humans from 10,000 years ago -- Neolithic in detecting threats and opportunities. Our republic, cities, and civic institutions are only a few hundreds years old. We are speeding our way into the unknown without fully understand what we are building or the contexts that which they came to be. I believe my history background gives me the ability to "hydrate" context, especially in social media era. It makes me think more fully about the things we are creating and putting out into the world and what is driving this force.

I've searched for people that think in systems, cross-disciplined in their training and studies, and lucid in describing complicated stuff. The first person I've known to have those characteristics was my history teacher in high school, Mr. Laney. He helped me and hundreds of students to cultivate a love for books, writing, and history.

When scary stuff happened like 9-11-01, he offered a commanding and reasoned perspective on it, a tour-de-force history of the region, and sophisticated answers to contradicting uncomfortable truths (stupid decisions are sometimes are the least bad ones). He was the first person to show me that the world is a complicated, unfair, and cruel place, but it can be understood. That feeling, the anxiety I felt when 9-11, COVID, Jan 6th, etc happened, that deep trauma, is assuaged by understanding why. His ability to smooth that turmoil through his lectures was a gift.

My wife and children bring immeasurable joy to my life. I am constantly amazed by the capacity to love and be loved by them. I am grateful for their presence every single day. I really love being a father, a role i didn't know I'd be good at or enjoy as much as I do.

My current favorite quote is from Maggie Smith's Good Bones. It goes something like this:

Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole,
chirps on about good bones:
This place could be beautiful, right?
You could make this place beautiful.

Inspiration and resources that formed this site