something bigger. What about friendship? What about enjoying the journey?
Mike looked up, and turned the board sideways to stop. When his board crunched to a halt, it was utterly silent in the cold mountain air. The ski run split here, and David was already out of sight. Which way did he go?
“Got a minute?” Mike asked, poking his head into David’s office, a few days later.
“Sure, let me just wrap this up.” David poked and prodded his computer into submission, and then looked up. “What can I do for you?”
It was late Tuesday evening, just three days before Gary’s deadline. Most of the team had stayed through dinner, and David had sprung for pizza for the team. Mike knew the department budget was exhausted from the purchase of a small pool of servers David had bought a few months earlier. That meant David had probably paid for the food out of his own pocket. The engineers were slowly trickling home now, and Mike figured he could get some uninterrupted time with David.
Mike pulled out a guest chair and flipped it around to sit backwards. “I don’t think we can do it. I don’t think there’s anything we can pull off before the end of the week that’s going to let us meet Gary’s ultimatum. I’ve had the whole team focused on it. We’ve run trials of every promising idea we’ve had, and nothing has made a dent.” He crossed his arms on the chair, and waited for David to answer.
David sat, hands steepled in front of him, staring at the window, a curious meld of room reflections and lights from outside. Mike noticed that David was running the RoomLightHack, developed by an Avogadro engineer to override the automatic light switches. The hack had been improved over time, and now it was possible to dim the lights. David had them set very dim.
A minute passed, and it was obvious that David still wasn’t going to say anything. If there was one thing that drove Mike crazy about David, it was his tendency to become uncommunicative exactly when the stakes were highest.
Another minute passed, and Mike started to mentally squirm. “I wish I could find something,” he finally said, “but I don’t know what. There’s this brilliant self-taught Serbian kid who is doing some stuff with artificial intelligence algorithms, and he’s doing it all on his home PC. I’ve been reading his blog, and it sounds like he has some really novel approaches to recommendation systems. But I don’t see any way we could duplicate what he’s doing before the end of the week.” Mike was really grasping at straws. Thin straws at that. He hated to bring bad news to David. “Maybe we can turn down the accuracy of the system. If we use fewer language-goal clusters, we can run with less memory and fewer processor cycles. Maybe…”
“No, don’t do that.”
David’s soft voice floated up out of the dim light, startling Mike.
David had looked up, and was smiling at Mike. “Listen, don’t worry about it. We’ve got a few days. You guys keep working on it. The executive team saw the demo a couple of weeks ago, and they liked it. We don’t want to fool around with the accuracy. It’s working well, and it impressed everyone. Keep the team working on the performance but don’t touch the system accuracy, and I’ll see if I can get the resources we need some other way.”
“Are you sure?” Mike asked quizzically, eyebrows raised.
“Yes, I’m sure. I’ll get the resources we need.” David sounded confident.
Mike left feeling puzzled. The deadline was a couple of days away. What could David possibly have in mind?
After Mike left, David stood up and wandered over to his office window. He looked out at the wet streets, glistening in the street lights. The Portland Streetcar stopped outside the building across the street, picking up a few last stragglers.
On the one hand, Gary Mitchell, Vice President of Communication Products Division, was an idiot with no vision. The irony was that the ELOPe project was intended as a feature to run on the very product that Gary had responsibility for, Avogadro’s email service. AvoMail would gain a killer feature when ELOPe was ready, and though David would gain accolades for developing it, it would be Gary’s group who would benefit financially through added users and additional business. All Gary had to do was support the project in the most minor way possible, and he’d accumulate all the credit.
On the other hand, David grudgingly admitted that if he was in Gary’s shoes, he would be worried about outages too. Damn it though, some things were worth a risk.
David thought through the apparent conflict. Gary wouldn’t approve running ELOPe on the current email server pool because it was consuming too many resources. The R&D server pool was out of the question because it was way too small. So either ELOPe had to consume less resources, which didn’t seem possible, or they needed a new server pool to run on, or they needed the email server pool to be bigger.
Consuming less resources was a technical problem. Getting more or different servers, that was a people problem. Namely, convincing the right people of what was needed. He could do something about that.
He sat back down at his computer. He stretched his arms, moved a few scraps of paper out of the way, and prepared to get to work. He opened up an editor, and started coding.
Hours passed in a blur. David looked at the time display on his screen and groaned. Christine was going to kill him. It was almost four in the morning. She was forgiving about his all consuming work habits, but she gave him hell for pulling all nighters. He’d be grumpy for two days until he made up the sleep, and she’d be pissed at him for being grumpy.
Trying again to milk the last drop from his coffee cup, he debated the merits of another coffee right now. Well, he had nothing to lose at this point. He stood up, a painful unbending of his spine after hours of hacking code. It had been more than six hours since his discussion with Mike, and he thought he had almost solved their resource problem.
He padded down the eco-cork floored hallway in his socks carrying his mug. He filled the mug and added sugar and cream, then stood for a few minutes half dazed from lack of sleep, letting the coffee warm him. He glanced up and down the hallway, black and tan patterns on the floor swimming in his fatigued eyes. The drone of the late evening vacuum cleaners was a distant memory, and now it was eerily quiet in the office, the kind of stillness that settled over a space only when every living person had been gone for hours. David wasn’t sure what that said about him. He shuffled back to his desk.
Hunched over his keyboard, David peered again at the code. The changes he made were subtle, oh so subtle. It was masterful programming, the kind of programming he hadn’t done since the early days of the project when it was just him and Mike. He needed to be extremely careful about each line of code he changed. A single bug introduced now would be the end of the project, if not his career.
A little more than an hour later, he carefully reviewed the code for the last time. Finally satisfied, David committed his changes to the source code repository. It would be automatically deployed and tested. He smiled for the first time in hours. Problem solved.
Chapter 3
Gary Mitchell took the Avogadro exit ramp off the Fremont bridge, and pulled up to the parking gate, headlights bouncing off the reflective paint on the barrier in the early morning darkness. He waved his badge triumphantly at the machine. The barrier rose up, and Gary drove into the nearly empty parking garage, a broad smile on his face.
It was two days before the deadline to pull ELOPe off the server. David and Mike hadn’t done anything to drop usage. Gary gleefully looked forward to sending an email to Sean Leonov letting him know he was going to kill ELOPe. He’d been looking forward to this day for months.
He would have liked to have pulled the plug first, and then send the email, but he knew Sean would be angry if he didn’t get a heads up before Gary shut it down.
