On returning home
Reflections on coming back to teach in Vietnam after Texas Tech.
For a few years my world was Lubbock, Texas — flat horizons, a serious HPC center, and the particular quiet of a research life far from home. I learned an enormous amount there. I also learned, slowly, that I wanted to bring it back.
What I brought back
Not just techniques — though there were plenty of those — but a stubborn belief that data should be made legible to people. At Texas Tech I built tools so that operators, not just experts, could understand a machine. Back at VNU-HCM, the “operators” are nineteen-year-olds meeting their first class diagram, and the goal is the same: make the invisible visible.
The hardest part
Returning is not only arrival; it is also re-learning a place that kept changing while you were away. The city is faster, the students are sharper and more online, and the research questions I care about have to make room for a teaching load. I would not trade it. Standing in front of a class on Nguyễn Văn Cừ, I feel closer to the point of all the work than I ever did debugging a render at 2 a.m. in Lubbock.
You do not really leave a place behind; you carry the best of it into the next room you walk into.
