Avogadro Corp

by William Hertling

  “No, on the performance front,” David said, his voice sharp even to his own ears.

  Mike raised his eyebrows and glanced at the door.

  David sighed and threw a crumpled-up sticky note toward the garbage can. Mike didn’t like it when he yelled and had given him the “appropriate work environment” lecture numerous times.

  “If we don’t have a performance gain, we’ve got bigger issues than the checkpoint.”

  “I’m not expecting anything, I’m afraid,” Mike said, glancing down to where David had missed the basket. “Dude.”

  “You had people on optimization, right?”

  Mike picked up the paper. “Yeah. We poured through profilers, analyzed every bit of network traffic and database queries. We tried dozens of options, focusing on our bottlenecks. Melanie even rewrote our in-memory representation from scratch. Everything we did either had no effect or made the performance worse. We backed out most of the changes and kept a few of the minor tweaks. The net gain is less than one percent. I’m sorry. We’ve been banging our heads against this for months. I know you want a miracle, but it’s not going to happen.”

  “Damn.” David scanned Mike’s full-wall whiteboard. One end had a checklist of features, fixes, and enhancements planned for the current release. Interspersed around the rest of the wall were box diagrams of the architecture, bits of code, and random ideas. David stared intensely, as though the solution to their performance problems might be found somewhere on the board.

  “It’s not there, I looked,” Mike said.

  David grunted, admitting that Mike guessed his thoughts. Mike had been smiling when David came in, and now he appeared as glum as his boss. David’s disappointment was contagious.

  “I hope you’re not thinking of canceling the snowboarding day,” Mike said. “We’ve had one for every other release. And there’s fresh snow.”

  David glanced out the window. December drizzle. That meant powder on the mountain. Damn. This project was too important to give everyone a day to play. “We’ve got to --” He turned back and trailed off mid-sentence at the expression on Mike’s face.

  “The team is expecting the trip,” Mike said. “Some of the guys were here until two in the morning getting their work done. They deserve their day off, and they’ll return refreshed and ready to tackle the performance issues. You can’t ask people to give their all and not give them something back.”

  David’s mouth opened and closed like a fish, as he bit back what he was going to say. His stomach clenched in frustration and he turned to stare out the window. “Do you have any sense of the pressure I’m under?”

  Mike nodded.

  “I guess one day won’t make that much of a difference with something we’ve been struggling with for six months,” David said. “But when we get back, I want one hundred and ten percent focus on performance. Take everything else off the backlog.”

  David leaned over and slapped the button on the alarm clock. He rolled onto his other side and looked at Christine, who was still sleeping. He kissed her on the cheek, watched her breathe for a minute, and slid out of bed. Dressing quickly in the dark, he slipped downstairs where his duffel bag and snowboard were waiting by the door.

  A few minutes later, Mike pulled up quietly in his Jetta, exhaust vapors puffing out of the tailpipe in the cold morning air. David brought his equipment out. Wordlessly, Mike opened the trunk and helped David load the gear. David climbed into the passenger side, and smiled. The glow of the dashboard illuminated two steaming coffee cups.

  “You’re fucking brilliant,” David said, taking a sip.

  “You’re welcome. The snow report said six inches of fresh powder on the mountain. Should be good.”

  “Where’s the rest of the team?”

  “Ah, most of them are driving up in Melanie’s new truck,” Mike answered. “I thought the two of us would drive together and give them a break from their manager and their chief architect.”

  David smiled. “You’re getting people-wise in your old age.”

  “I’m not old yet. I’m certainly not an old married man like you.”

  It was about an hour’s drive to Mount Hood. For a while they rode in companionable silence, heading east on I-84, enjoying the coffee and early morning light.

  “Where do you want to be in a couple of years?” David asked, breaking the quiet.

  Mike glanced sideways. “Whoa, dude. That’s a weighty question for oh dark thirty.” He paused to consider. “You know, I’m happy now. I’m working with awesome people on the most interesting project I can imagine. I’ve got a good manager, even if I have to keep you in line from time to time.”

  David grinned.

  “I like what I’m doing,” Mike said. “I don’t think I could ask for more. More servers, maybe.”

  They both chuckled.

  “How about you?”

  “I’ve been thinking about what I want to do next.” David was quiet for a moment. “Worrying about Gary and his deadline keeps me awake at night, gives me plenty of time to ponder the future.”

  “Man, don’t get stressed. We’ll solve the problem. Or we won’t, and Sean will give us additional servers somehow. ELOPE’s not worth losing precious sleep over. We all need more of that.”

  “It’s not just the servers. Yes, of course I want ELOPe to be released and the project to succeed. Being hired to run ELOPe was a huge break for me.” David paused and shook his head. “No, the real problem is I don’t want to be under anyone’s thumb like we are with Gary. We’re doing all the work here, and sure we’ll get some credit, but in the end, the profit and kudos will go to Gary Mitchell. Meanwhile, we have to take shit from him.”

  Mike paused. “What are you thinking?”

  “We build on the credibility we have right after we release ELOPe to get the support to do a big project from the ground up. A brand new product for Avogadro that won’t be subordinated to Gary. Something that can change the world.”

  Mike nodded. “Sure, that would be nice, but—”

  “Not just nice,” David cut him off. “It’s what I’m meant to do. I know it deep in my bones.”

  Mike glanced at David but bit back whatever he was going to say.

  “Did I ever tell you about my dad?” David started after some minutes of silence.

  “You two used to build stuff in your garage together.”

  “After the army, he went to work as a machinist. He brought home a bunch of old tools the factory was throwing out, refurbished them, and we used to build stuff, anything really, in the shop in the garage. I was the only kid around who fabricated birdhouses out of steel.”

  “Sounds cool. I never built anything with my father.”

  “It was cool. He was always inventing new things. My mother would complain about the ironing board, and he’d build one from scratch. He was an inventor through-and-through.”

  “Like you.”

  “Exactly. But the difference is he worked in the same factory for thirty years. Paid for me and my sister to go to college and then died on the job, doing the same machinist work he’d been doing the day he started.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  David shrugged. “It was five years ago. When he died, they replaced him with a CNC machine. An automated metal cutter. You understand? He was an amazing man, but he’s gone.”

  Mike was quiet for a minute. “We all die eventually.”

  “I want to make a dent in the universe,” David said softly. “Just a small dent, and get some credit for it.”

  Sixty miles east and an hour later, Mike slid down the lift ramp and snapped into his bindings. David had already started down the run. Mike jumped to get forward momentum and followed him down the mountain.

  He didn’t understand David. Blindingly brilliant, David was fun to be friends with. On the other hand, his drive and focus on what was over the horizon caused him to lose sight of where he was. The story about his father was touching, but David missed the fact that his father so
unded like a happy man, someone who enjoyed his life.

  Damn. David had shrunk to a small black blob on the slope far ahead. Mike bent further to pick up more speed, and the cold mountain air whistled through the vent holes in his snowboarding helmet.

  The difference in perspective, even when he and David were immersed in the same situation, amazed him. This was the best time of Mike’s career. Sure, folks like Gary came along, adding to the challenge. David, faced with the identical state of affairs, took personal affront at Gary’s influence. Worse, he saw ELOPe as merely a stepping-stone to something bigger. What about the results of this project, or friendship, or enjoying the journey?

  Mike turned the board sideways to stop. When he 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?

  Mike walked into David’s office. “Got a minute?”

  It was late Tuesday evening, just three days before Gary’s deadline. David had sprung for pizza and most of the team worked through dinner. The department budget had less than a buck left, since David’s purchase of a small pool of servers a few weeks ago, implying David paid for the food out of his pocket. The engineers were slowly trickling home now and finally Mike could share the bad news without an audience.

  “Sure, just let me wrap this up.” David poked and prodded his computer into submission. “What can I do for you?”

  Mike turned a guest chair around and sat backwards. “We can’t make Gary’s ultimatum. Nothing we can pull off before the end of the week is going to make a significant difference. I’ve had the whole team focused on performance. We’ve run trials of every promising idea and we’ve improved by a mere three percent.” He crossed his arms and waited for David to respond.

  David sat, hands steepled in front of him, staring out the window, the glass a curious meld of room reflections and lights from outside. David’s room ran the RoomLightHack, developed by an Avogadro engineer to override the automatic light switches. The hack had been improved over time, making it possible to dim the room’s LEDs. David had them set somewhere between moonlight and starlight.

  A minute passed, and it was obvious David wasn’t going to say anything. His tendency to become uncommunicative exactly when the stakes were highest drove Mike crazy.

  Another long minute went by, and Mike started to mentally squirm. “I wish I could find something,” he blurted, “but I don’t know what. There’s this brilliant self-taught Serbian kid who’s doing some stuff with artificial intelligence algorithms, and on his home PC, no less. I’ve been reading his blog, and he has some novel approaches to lightweight recommendation systems. But there’s no way we could duplicate what he’s doing before the end of the week.”

  Mike was really grasping at straws, and thin ones 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.”

  Mike was startled by David’s soft voice floating up out of the dimness. “No, don’t do that.”

  David smiled in the glow of his display. “Listen, don’t worry. We’ve got a few days. You guys keep working. The executive team loved the demo a couple of weeks ago. We don’t want to fool around with the accuracy when ELOPe impressed everyone so much. Keep the team working on performance but don’t touch the system accuracy. I’ll get the resources we need some other way.”

  “Are you sure?” Mike asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’ll get the servers.” He suddenly sounded confident.

  Mike left 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 window. The wet pavement glistened in the glare of streetlights. The Portland Streetcar stopped outside the building, picking up a few last stragglers.

  On the one hand, Gary was an idiot with no vision. ELOPe would run on the very product Gary had responsibility for, Avogadro’s email service. AvoMail would gain a killer feature when ELOPe was ready, and though David might receive accolades, Gary’s group would profit through added users and additional business. If Gary supported the project in even the most minor way, he’d get massive publicity and credit.

  On the other hand, if he were in Gary’s shoes, he’d probably worry about outages, too. But, damn it, some things were worth the risk.

  So how could he resolve the apparent conflict? Gary wouldn’t approve running ELOPe on production servers because the software consumed excessive resources. The R&D server pool lacked sufficient computing power by several orders of magnitude. So either ELOPe had to become more efficient, which didn’t seem possible, or they needed a new group of servers to run on, or the email server capacity must be bigger.

  The technical challenge of resource use appeared intractable. But getting more or different servers was a people problem, a question of convincing the right managers of what was needed. He paced the office, deep in thought, until—yes. That would do it.

  David 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 computer clock and groaned: almost four in the morning. Christine would kill him. She forgave his all-consuming work habits, but she gave him hell when he pulled all-nighters. He’d be irritable for 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 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 more than six hours of hacking code. Every minute had been worthwhile: he’d almost solved the resource problem.

  Mug in hand, he padded down the eco-cork floored hallway in his socks. He filled the mug with coffee, added sugar and cream, then stood for a few minutes in a daze, letting the hot beverage 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 a distant memory, it was eerily quiet in the office now, the kind of stillness that settled over a space only when every living being 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 subtle changes were masterful, the sort of work he hadn’t done since the early days of ELOPe, when just he and Mike did all the development. 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 reviewed the changes line by line 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, the light from the car’s headlights bouncing off the reflective paint on the barrier in the early morning darkness. He waved his badge at the machine. The gate rose up, and Gary drove into the empty garage, a hint of a 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. In fact, he’d woken to blaring alerts from his phone: there’d been small CPU spikes all night long, and a big one this morning about five, right around the time the East Coast workday was starting.

  The idiots had come within a hairsbreadth of overloading the whole system. Fortunately, AvoMail adapted dynamically, cutting back polling frequencies and slowing the delivery of mail, but they’d been close to a full outage.

  Gary alternated between anger and glee. He’d never had significant downtime on his watch, and didn’t plan to. But this time David had brought them so close to di
saster that Gary could justify sending the email he’d been wanting to write for months, telling Sean he was kicking ELOPe off production.

  He would have liked to pull the plug first and then send the message, but that was pushing the line with Sean.

  It was the first time in a while Gary had arrived at the office this early. He found the empty building disquieting. He pushed the feeling aside and thought about emailing Sean, bringing a smile back to his face.

  A few minutes later, Gary passed his secretary’s vacant desk and entered his own office. His computer came to life, and he went straight to AvoMail to compose the email to Sean.

  From: Gary Mitchell

  To: Sean Leonov

  Subject: ELOPe Project

  Time: 6:22am

  Body:

  Sean, just to give you a heads up. I have no choice but to pull production access for the Email Language Optimization Project. They’re consuming 2,000 times the server resources we allocated, and spiked usage this morning, causing degraded service levels for ninety minutes.

  We gave them carte blanche when we had excess capacity because it’s your special project. However, they consume so many resources we routinely dip into reserve capacity, and service degradations like the one they caused today lose us commercial accounts every time.

  I spoke to David and Mike about their server utilization many times, but they did nothing to get usage down. I gave them a final warning two weeks ago and have seen no improvements.

  Effective tomorrow at 9am, I’m revoking production access for ELOPe.

  Email finished, Gary sat and stared for a minute. Was he too obviously gloating? He didn’t think so. He hit send.

  Time for coffee. He sauntered down the hallway whistling.