had come out, and he raised his face to it for a few moments. Looking down, he saw the light glisten on wet streets, perhaps one of his favorite parts of the rain. He remembered as a kid he would run outside on rainy days when the sun broke through the clouds, pretending that fairies had covered the street with magic dust. A crowd of laughing people, marketing folk from their attire, entered the skybridge, distracting him from his memories. He continued through the sky bridge, and then down four flights of stairs to his office. Out of the sun, and into the fluorescent gloom of basement offices.
At one department meeting after another, Pete had been assured that his Internal Tools team, responsible for delivering the IT tools used inside the company, would be relocated just as soon as there was available above ground office space again. Pete shook his head thinking about it. It was no surprise to Pete that the Internal Tools team was stuck in what effectively amounted to the dungeons of Avogadro Corp. Everyone in the company used their tools every day to get their jobs done, from ordering office supplies to getting more disk space to filling out their timecards. But because they didn’t develop the sexy customer-facing products, they were the absolute runts of the company. No executives or research and development engineers would ever be sentenced to the basement offices. It was enough to make him gnash his teeth sometimes.
When Pete got back to his desk, he took solace in his lunch. His office space might suck, and his job might be unappreciated, but at least the food was good. Fresh gnocchi in a butter sauce, mixed salad greens, and a cup of gelatto in a special vacuum insulated cup that kept it cold while he ate his lunch. All organic and locally sourced, of course. The coffee wasn’t bad either, though it came from Kobos. Pete preferred Ristretto Roasters over Kobos, but of course only a few of Portland’s coffee roasters were big enough to supply Avogadro’s headquarters. Ristretto was one of the best micro-roasters in town. Pete’s wife, who was a tea drinker, couldn’t understand the Portland obsession with coffee.
While he ate, Pete looked over his inbox. A new email caught his eye, and he opened it.
To: Pete Wong (Internal Tools)
From: John Anderson (Procurement)
Subject: Email Procurement Forms
Hi Pete,
This is John Anderson. I work over in Procurement. Even though we’ve got a procurement web application that I know you guys created, we still get hundreds of email requests into the procurement department. Part of the problem is that we’ve got sales people in the field who can send emails from their smartphone, but have a hard time getting a secure VPN connection to the internal web sites. Is it possible to create an email-to-web bridge that would allow people to email us, and get a return form by email that they could submit to make requests? I mentioned this to Sean Leonov, and he said you guys could whip up something like this in a day or two.
Pete Wong stared at this strange email. John Anderson, some guy in Procurement, was buddies with Sean Leonov, cofounder of Avogadro? Sean was a living legend at Avogadro. Pete hadn’t met anyone who knew Sean Leonov directly.
Pete pondered the email. Why did Sean think that Internal Tools could implement this in a day? Was Sean Leonov even aware that there was an Internal Tools department at Avogadro? How had they gotten his email address? It all seemed so unlikely.
It was a bizarre request, but it was true that he could pull it together easily. He imagined a salesperson working in the field, using their smartphone to access internal sites. Small screen, low bandwidth. The justification for the request made sense. And if doing this impressed Sean Leonov, well, that couldn’t hurt his career. Maybe he could get onto one of the real R&D project teams instead of being stuck in the dead-end Internal Tools department. Daydreaming of an office with sunlight pouring in big windows, he spent a few minutes lost in thought imagining what his office would look like with a big window overlooking the street, or even better, the river.
With a start, he sat up straight and decided he could definitely spend a few minutes looking into the request. He eagerly put his fingers on the keyboard and starting searching. When his first Avogadro search for ‘email to web service’ within seconds turned up an existing design posted by some IBM guys, his excitement grew. After reading through the design, he realized he could implement it all in a couple of hours.
His other work forgotten, Pete started in on the project. He used the existing Internal Tools servers, and created a new Ruby on Rails web application that converted web pages to emails, and emails into web page form submissions. It was easier than expected, and by lunch he had a simple prototype running.
He tried the prototype on the Internal Tools Request tool, and discovered some bugs. Puzzling over the details in his head, he mindlessly rushed down the hall to the coffee station for a refill.
Mike left his office, nodded to a few teammates he passed, and headed downstairs for the nearest outside door. After banging his head against the same problem for two hours and becoming increasingly frustrated, he needed to clear his mind and get a fresh perspective. The damn performance issues were becoming the insurmountable obstacle.
Once outside, Mike wandered around Avogadro’s South Plaza, an open amphitheater and park. Just one of the many perks that Avogadro employed to keep their everyone happy. The ground was wet from early morning rains, but the sky was blissfully clear now. He waved to a couple of engineers he knew that he saw jogging.
He thought back to his discovery. What he found that morning was even more puzzling than the issues he expected to run into.
Mike thought about the two distinct parts of the ELOPe system. The part that users saw, of course, was the front-end process that ran in real-time to evaluate emails that were being written by users and to offer suggested improvements. The piece that was troubling Mike was the other half, the backend process that analyzed historical emails to generate the language analysis and recommendation clusters.
While the performance of ELOPe was horrible by anyone’s measure, at least it was predictably horrible. In the course of attempting to improve the efficiency over the past months, Mike learned that each new email fed into ELOPe required roughly the same number of processor cycles to process the data.
This morning, nothing was predictable. According to the system logs, nobody was using ELOPe last night, and yet the load metrics were pegged — a sure indication that a ton of computer processing time was being spent on something. But what? ELOPe was in closed prototype mode. Mike knew that only the members of the development team had access. That meant software coders, interaction designers, and the linguistics experts particular to their project. Everyone’s activities were logged. Yet the someone or something was consuming processing resources, while the logs didn’t indicate any activity.
Mike hoped the fresh air and a walk around the Plaza would help him figure out the problem. The last thing he needed was additional performance problems when what they were looking for was a massive improvement in performance. He sat on the amphitheater steps, and rested his head on his hands. He watched another set of joggers go by. For someone who prided himself on taking things easy, the world was sure weighing heavy on his shoulders right now.
Chapter 4
Pete Wong was damn proud of himself. In less than a day he had successfully implemented a working email to web bridge. Well, maybe implemented was a strong word. He had cut and pasted code from a dozen different websites, and wrapped it all up with some virtual duct tape. It was a real kludge that he wouldn’t want to show off in a coding style contest. On the other hand, it worked, by golly! He tested it against the Internal Tools web service, the Procurement web application, and have a dozen other web sites. It seemed to work for everything.
He drummed his thumbs excitedly against the desk. Using off the shelf libraries that other people had written
