Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears (Singularity Series)

by William Hertling

  “So two weeks. What do you want to do?” Mike prompted, after a minute of this painful silence.

  “Let’s pare down the number of people we have working on fixes and algorithm improvements,” David finally said, clearly having reached some internal conclusion. “How many people can you put full-time on performance?”

  “I’ll focus full time on it,” Mike volunteered, starting to count off on his fingers. “Certainly Melanie,” he added, referring to one of their senior software engineers. “Figure two or three other folks. Probably five in all. David,” he paused to look him square in the eyes, “we’re not going to make any improvements.”

  “Alright, starting with the five of you, get focused on it full time,” David said, ignoring Mike’s protest. “After we hit our next release milestone on Thursday, we’ll see where we stand.”

  Mike sighed and left the office.

  Chapter 2

  “How’s it going?” David asked, coming into Mike’s office a few days later, and taking a perch on the windowsill.

  “Excellent,” Mike replied, looking up from his screen. “Everyone on the team has finished their tasks for the iteration, code is checked in, and the integration tests are running. We should know in a few minutes if everything passed.”

  “No, no, on the performance front?” David said, frustrated. He crumpled up a sticky note and threw it into Mike’s garbage. “If we don’t have a performance gain, we’ve got bigger issues than our checkpoint.”

  “I’m not expecting anything, I’m afraid,” Mike answered. He looked down, where David had missed the basket.

  “You had people on it right?”

  David looked out the window, ignoring the paper on the floor. Mike sighed and picked it up himself. “Yeah,” he said. “I explored a few possibilities myself, and as we planned, I had four other engineers try some performance tweaks. 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. Net gain, 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 just not likely to happen.”

  “Damn, damn, damn.” David sighed, and turned the other way to look at Mike’s whiteboard which, like his own, covered the entirety of one wall. One end was covered with a checklist of features, fixes, and enhancements planned for the current software release. Interspersed through the remainder of the whiteboard 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 in a depressed tone.

  David grunted, admitting that Mike guessed his thoughts.

  “I hope you’re not thinking of canceling the snowboarding day,” Mike said. “The team has always had a snowboarding day when we hit our release commitment on time and there’s snow on the mountain.”

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

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

  David felt sick over his lack of control over the situation. He felt a huge pressure to meet Gary’s deadline, but he knew Mike was right. Besides, he rationalized that one day wouldn’t make a difference with a problem they’d been struggling against for six months. “Fine, but when we get back, we need everyone focused one hundred and ten percent on performance. Take everything off the backlog except performance improvements.”

  * * *

  David leaned over and slapped the button on the alarm clock. Then he rolled over onto his other side and looked at Christine, still sleeping. He gave her a kiss 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 his tailpipe in the cold morning air. David went outside, bringing his equipment and locking the front door. Wordlessly, Mike opened the trunk, and helped David get his gear loaded. David climbed into the passenger side, and smiled. In the glow of the dashboard lights, he could see that Mike already had two steaming, insulated coffee cups.

  “You’re fucking brilliant,” David said, reaching to take a sip of his coffee.

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

  “Where’s the rest of the team?”

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

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

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

  Mike headed towards Mt. Hood, about an hour drive away. For a while they drove in companionable silence, heading east on I-84, enjoying the coffee, and the early morning light.

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

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

  David smiled at the compliment.

  “I’d be happy to be doing more of the same,” Mike went on. “I don’t think I could ask for more. More servers maybe.”

  They both chuckled at that.

  “How about you?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it.” David was quiet for a moment. “Worrying about Gary and his deadline keeps me awake at night.”

  “Man, you don’t have to do that. We’ll solve the problem. Or we won’t, and Sean will give us more servers somehow. It’s not worth losing precious sleep over. We all need more of that.”

  “It’s not just that. Yes, of course I want ELOPe to be released and the project to be a success. Being hired to run ELOPe was a great break for me.” David paused and shook his head. “No, the real thing is that 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, all of it will go into Gary Mitchell’s bottom line. Meanwhile, we have to take shit from him.”

  Mike paused. “What are you thinking?”

  “I think we can take the credibility we have right after we release ELOPe. We can build on that, and get the support to do something big from the ground up. A brand new product for Avogadro. Something that won’t get 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 over at David, hoping it was just coffee talking, but fearing worse.

  * * *

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

  He just didn’t understand David sometimes. David was blindingly brilliant and fun to be friends with. On the other hand, he was so driven, always focused on what was just beyond the horizon, that he seemed to lose sight of where he was.

  Damn, David was far ahead of him. Mike bent further to pick up a littl
e more speed. The cold mountain air whistled around the vent holes in his snowboarding helmet.

  Mike was amazed how he and David could be immersed in the same situation and see it two completely different ways. Mike was having the best time of his career working on an exciting project with great people. Sure, folks like Gary came along, but that just added to the challenge. David looked at the same situation, and took personal affront at Gary’s influence. Worse, he was starting to see the project as merely a stepping stone to 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 sendin
g 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.

  It was the first time in a while he’d arrived at the office this early. Gary found the empty building oddly disquieting. He pushed the feeling aside and thought about sending the email, which brought a smile back to his face again. A few minutes later, Gary passed his secretary’s empty desk and went into his own office. His desk computer came to life, and Gary went straight into his email to type the message to Sean.

  From: Gary Mitchell (Communications Products Operations)

  To: Sean Leonov (Executive Team)

  Subject: ELOPe Project

  Time: 6:22am

  Body:

  Sean, just to give you a heads up, on Friday I’m going to have to pull the production resources for the Email Language Optimization Project. They’re consuming almost 2,000 times the server resources we allocated to them. I’ve given them almost carte blanche when we had excess capacity because I know it’s your special project. However, they’re consuming so many resources that we’ve twice eaten into the reserve server pool. As you know, if we exhaust the reserve server pool, we’d start having distributed AvoMail service outages. The last time that happened we lost a dozen commercial account opportunities we had in the sales pipeline. I’ve spoken to David and Mike about it again and again, but they’ve done nothing to get their resource utilization down. I gave them a final warning and two weeks to do something about it, but they’ve done nothing.

  Email finished, Gary sat and gloated for a minute. Then he heaved himself back up, and headed out to find a coffee shop and a newspaper. Naturally, it was too early to do any real work. He’d read the paper and come back in a couple of hours.