Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears by William Hertling Read Free Book Online

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 for Ruby on Rails, his favorite programming environment, he had been able to glue together the relevant pieces quickly. The ability to do in hours what would have once taken weeks in an old language like Java was the magic of modern programming environments like Ruby. It was easy to understand why startups built products in a weekend now and were launched on shoestring budgets when they had such powerful tools. He wondered for the hundredth time if he shouldn’t leave Avogadro to go start his own company.
    Pete pulled his keyboard closer and wrote an email to John Anderson, the guy in Procurement who had requested the email bridge. In a bold move, he cc:’ed Sean Leonov, just so that he could see exactly who it was in the Internal Tools department that had implemented it. Pete explained in the email what he had implemented, and how to use it. By the time he was done, he had written