Chapter 157 Online Friends in Beijing

In late November, the temperature drop in Huizhou came very abruptly.

Not long ago, I could still stroll around campus in just a long-sleeved shirt, but after an autumn rain, the dry, cold wind felt like a dull knife cutting into my face.

It's 11 p.m.

Chen Zhuo tightened the zipper of his coat, carrying two thick wind tunnel mechanical assembly manuals in his hands, and walked from the Faculty of Science towards the dormitory building.

Today, he spent the afternoon arguing with Wu Tao about the convergence of virtual time compensation in the conference room of the School of Mathematical Sciences. In the evening, he went to the underground wind tunnel laboratory to help Zhang Yuan copy down the delay tolerances of hundreds of sensors one by one.

My brain has been in a state of high-intensity operation for a long time, but now, walking in the cold wind, I actually feel much more awake.

Upon reaching the second floor, Chen Zhuo took out his key and pushed open the door to dormitory 215.

The bathroom door was half open, and the sound of running water could be heard from inside, along with the smell of soap wafting out.

"Dayong, still awake?"

Chen Zhuo placed the thick picture book in his hand on his desk and casually took off his coat and hung it on the back of his chair.

The sound of water stopped.

Wang Dayong, wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt, poked his head out of the bathroom.

"No, I was applying lubricant to that vacuum chamber in Professor Liu's lab today, and I got rust-proof paint all over my sleeve."

Wang Dayong smiled, his hands covered in dense white foam, which had turned slightly red from being soaked in hot water.

"This paint was so sticky that I had to turn the water up to the highest temperature and pour in half a basin of laundry detergent to scrub it off."

Chen Zhuo walked over and leaned against the bathroom door frame.

"As long as it can be washed off, is the cavity set up on Professor Liu's side?"

"The main structure is stable, but we still need to adjust a few valves tomorrow."

As Wang Dayong spoke, he turned on the tap, and the hot water gushed out, washing the foam off his hands.

"Xiao Zhuo, go check on the neighbor across the hall later. Chu Ge is acting like he's taken the wrong medicine tonight. I can hear him typing so loudly even in the sound of running water. I hope he's not having some kind of insurmountable problem again."

As Chen Zhuo listened, he glanced towards the opposite door.

"Okay, I'll go see what's wrong with him. You should get some rest after you're done washing up."

Chen Zhuo turned and walked out of dormitory 215.

The corridor was quiet when Chen Zhuo reached out and pushed open the door.

As soon as I entered, I saw Lu Jia sitting at his desk, wearing a huge pair of noise-canceling headphones.

He was holding a red pen, making rapid annotations in a thick English original book, muttering to himself, completely absorbed in his own world, and didn't even notice someone entering the room.

As for the other side, they're making a huge commotion.

Chu Ge sat in the ergonomic chair, one leg resting on the edge of the chair, looking extremely arrogant.

He had a lollipop dangling from his mouth, making a loud crunching sound as he chewed it.

His hands seemed to have some deep-seated hatred for the keyboard, his fingers slamming down on the keys in a rapid, clattering sound.

Chen Zhuo slowly walked over and leaned against the iron shelf next to Chu Ge's desk.

On Chu Ge's desk was a huge transparent plastic jar filled with lollipops of various flavors. Next to the base of the computer monitor, there were already seven or eight crumpled candy wrappers piled up.

"Are you writing code, or are you dismantling school assets?"

Chen Zhuo looked at Chu Ge and teased him gently.

Upon hearing the sound, Chu Ge abruptly stopped typing on the Enter key.

He turned his head, pulled the lollipop, which had been chewed flat, out of his mouth, and let out a long breath.

"Brother Zhuo, you're back."

Chu Ge reached out and frantically rubbed his already messy hair, pointing at the computer screen in front of him, his tone filled with obvious irritability and resentment.

"If the keyboard breaks down today, it's that bastard from Beijing's business."

Chen Zhuo followed his finger and looked at the screen.

It was a webpage interface with the classic blue navigation bar of Tsinghua University's Shuimu BBS at the top. The current forum was Algorithms and Data Structures. In the very center of the screen was a popular post that had already garnered hundreds of replies.

"Did you have a fight with someone?"

Chen Zhuo pulled over an empty chair from Lu Jia next to him and sat down, glancing at the poster's ID.

The ID was a string of random English letters, and the IP address was located in Beijing.

"They've been arguing for half a month."

Chu Ge put the lollipop back in his mouth, chewed it up with a smacking sound, and mumbled something indistinctly.

"These guys in Beijing, I don't know what's going on in their heads, their ideas are wildly unrestrained."

Chen Zhuo glanced at the scrolling replies on the screen and asked casually.

"What thoughts could make you so anxious that you chewed up so many lollipops?"

Chu Ge turned his chair around to face Chen Zhuo and began to pour out his grievances.

"This person posted a thread discussing a brand new Internet product architecture. He said that current websites, such as Sina and Sohu, are portals where people search for information. He wanted to create a website that would completely transfer real-life interpersonal relationships to the Internet."

Chu Ge famously made a large circle in mid-air with his hand.

"Real-name registration. You're from USTC, so you fill it in, and the system recommends USTC alumni to you. You add me, I add Lu Jia, and Lu Jia adds Dayong. This guy says that through the network of six people, he can connect people all over the country and even the world. There are no barriers and no distances." Chen Zhuo listened quietly.

He leaned back in his chair, watching Chu Ge gesticulate wildly, and raised an eyebrow.

"Six degrees of separation theory".

Chen Zhuo uttered a single word softly.

"Yes! That's what he called it in his post."

Chu Ge slapped his thigh.

"This concept is indeed novel. I also think that if this thing were actually made, it would absolutely crush those current BBS forums that only know how to spam. Since you think it's good, then why are you all arguing about it?"

"They're arguing about the underlying architecture!"

Chu Ge's temper flared up again whenever this was mentioned.

He turned around, dragging the mouse rapidly across the screen, pointing to several lines of code.

"This guy knows the product, but his coding logic is a disaster! He posted his proposed backend database architecture in a thread, and he actually wanted to use nested queries in a relational database to iterate through a user's friend list!"

Chu Ge became more and more excited as he spoke, and the swivel chair was pushed back half a meter by his foot.

"Think about it, if one layer has ten friends, two layers would be a hundred, three layers would be a thousand. He'd have to use SELECT statements and nested loops to sift through the database layer by layer! I replied to him directly in the post, saying that with this logic, it might be fine for ten people in the beta, but once the user base exceeds ten thousand, if you ask him to check his third-degree friends, your server will burn to ashes in the server room!"

Chen Zhuo imagined the exponentially exponentially increasing nested query algorithm and nodded in deep agreement.

"It's quite server-intensive; this one is probably a hardware hog."

Chen Zhuo gave a very fair evaluation.

"Right!"

Chu Ge seemed to have found a kindred spirit and slammed his fist on the table.

"I kindly reminded him, and this is how this bastard responded?"

Chu Ge reached out and scrolled down the page, pointing to one of the bolded and highlighted replies.

Chen Zhuo leaned closer to take a look.

That reply was only one line long.

"Typical programmer mindset: focusing solely on computing power and the underlying system. Before the core product logic is running smoothly, excessive optimization of the underlying system is a waste of time. You don't understand what user growth is at all."

Chen Zhuo couldn't help but chuckle softly.

This statement precisely hit Chu Ge's sore spot as a self-taught geek.

He called me a programmer!

Chu Ge, furious, spat the flattened plastic stick into the trash can next to the table, then peeled an orange-flavored lollipop from the jar and stuffed it into his mouth. "How could I tolerate his temper? I spent three hours on the spot writing a low-level pointer-optimized traversal script in C, and pasted it directly into the replies to show him what the art of code is and what algorithmic dimensionality reduction is."

Chen Zhuo looked at the long, extremely concise piece of optimized code on the screen, then turned to look at Chu Ge.

"and then?"

"Then?"

Chu Ge rolled his eyes and pointed to the latest reply.

"This bastard took my code and ran a test. After it was done, he posted that the speed was indeed three times faster, but the memory overflow problem was not solved, and he asked me to modify it again."

Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair and touched his lips with the back of his hand to hide his smile.

"Chu Ge, have you noticed?"

Chen Zhuo spoke gently, with a touch of self-assured playfulness.

"You're essentially doing free outsourcing code writing for someone else; they haven't even paid you a deposit."

Chu Ge abruptly stopped biting the lollipop.

He stared at Chen Zhuo, blinked twice, and opened his mouth slightly, as if he had just realized the logic.

"Damn it."

Chu Ge let out a frustrated sigh and slapped his forehead.

"It's true, how did I get led astray by him? I was so focused on arguing with him that I ended up writing the underlying scripts for three core modules for him for free these past two weeks!"

Seeing Chu Ge's discomfiture, Chen Zhuo smiled and prepared to get up and return to his dormitory.

Just then.

Suddenly, a very clear beeping sound came from the computer.

Chu Ge glanced down at the bottom right corner of the screen.

A notification box for a new private message popped up in the lower right corner of the ShuiMu BBS webpage.

The sender was the same Beijing IP address that had been at odds with Chu Ge for half a month.

Chu Ge opened the message.

The message was short, without any unnecessary words, just a string of English letters and a few words.

"Add me on MSN, and if you've got the guts, don't log off."

Chu Ge stared at the line of words, his earlier annoyance vanishing instantly. A smile, tinged with extreme confidence and excitement, slowly spread across his face.

"That bastard, he finally swallowed his pride and agreed to a private chat."

Chu Ge's fingers moved the mouse rapidly, clicking the MSN icon on the computer desktop.

It was a logo of two little green figures crossed together.

Log in, add friends, enter your account.

The other person had clearly been sitting in front of the computer the whole time; the friend request was accepted in less than two seconds.

A dialog box popped up on the screen.

The other person's name is very simple, just one character, Xing.

Chen Zhuo stood to the side without leaving, watching the two begin their rapid exchange in the chat box.

Xing: "The memory reclamation mechanism you posted this afternoon has a deadlock vulnerability. If the pointer is not released during concurrent access, the server will still crash."

Chu Ge put his hands back on the keyboard and typed so fast that his fingers left afterimages.

Chu Ge: "That was a compromise to accommodate your garbage table structure! If you dare to split the primary key index, I can make it twice as fast, and there will be absolutely no deadlock."

The other side remained silent for about ten seconds.

The top of the dialog box displays "The other party is typing...".

Xing: "How do we dismantle it?"

Chu Ge gave a smug snort, spinning the lollipop in his mouth rapidly.

He began typing out his database breakdown plan in the chat box, effortlessly using various technical terms and underlying logic. Chen Zhuo stood to the side, watching the chat history scroll by.

One of them was in a rented room in Zhongguancun, Beijing, his mind filled with ideas to bring the latest social networking models from Silicon Valley back to China; the other was in a boys' dormitory in Anhui, chewing on a lollipop, using his hardcore low-level coding skills to fill in the gaps in his wildly imaginative theories. Chen Zhuo didn't interrupt them.

He could tell that although Chu Ge was cursing and swearing, the light in his eyes when he encountered someone of his own kind was undeniable.

The arguments that lasted for half a month did not turn them into enemies. Instead, they built a mutual respect and appreciation through picking on each other and repeatedly starting over.

"Brother Zhuo."

Chu Ge suddenly spoke, his gaze still fixed on the screen.

"This guy is actually pretty amazing. He just sent me some sketches of his product prototypes. His thinking is extremely clear. He even considered how to use campus email to do a cold start with the first batch of users."

Chu Ge pressed Enter and sent over a piece of refactored table structure code.

"He said he had just dropped out of school in the US not long ago, and now he's gathered a few classmates to work on making this thing a reality. He's even thought of a name for it," Chen Zhuo said casually as he turned around.

"Sounds like a passionate, amateurish group."

"you do not say."

Chu Ge smiled.

"We don't even have a decent backend lead programmer; we have to learn everything on the fly, but..."

Chu Ge stopped what he was doing and turned to look at Chen Zhuo.

"However, he asked me if I was interested in being a technical helper, building the underlying framework for them online. There would be no money, no salary, but he could give me a share of the profits in writing."

Chen Zhuo looked at Chu Ge.

"You want to take it?"

"I'm just idling around anyway."

Chu Ge took out another lollipop from the transparent jar and played with it in his hand.

"Before, when I wrote an inventory management system for small business owners, I'd barely get a few thousand yuan in final payment, and I'd be constantly being bossed around and having my requirements changed. Working with this guy, even though I didn't get paid, if this thing could actually get tens of thousands of users online..."

Chugo paused, his eyes gleaming with undisguised ambition.

"That would be so exciting!"

Chen Zhuo nodded, offering no intrusive advice.

This is Chu Ge's own track; he has an instinctive love and keen sense for code and the internet.

"Take control of your own destiny."

Chen Zhuo patted the back of Chu Ge's chair.

"Just don't get sold out and then help the seller count the money, since you've never even met him."

Chu Ge bit open the candy wrapper and stuffed the candy into his mouth.

"He sold it to me? With his lousy database, I'd be lucky if I didn't leave him a couple of backdoors. I have the core algorithm in my hands, he can't escape."

The dialog box beeped again.

Xing: "I'll send you the full database table structure to your email tomorrow afternoon. Can you take a look at the restructuring plan? Time is tight, so it would be best if we could have a first draft by tomorrow night." Chu Ge typed on the keyboard.

Chu Ge: "It depends on my mood. I'm not watching tonight. I'm going to sleep."

After sending this message, Chu Ge immediately changed his MSN status to "away".

He stretched out a big yawn, his bones cracking and popping.

"Alright, we've managed to overpower him tonight."

Chu Ge stood up and glanced at Lu Jia, who was still frantically writing annotations beside him.

He walked over and tapped Lu Jia's desk twice heavily.

Lu Jia shuddered, took off her heavy headphones, and looked up blankly.

"What's wrong?"

Lu Jia pushed up her glasses.

"It's almost midnight, bro. Are you planning to practice your hearing until dawn?"

Chu Ge pointed to the alarm clock on Lu Jia's desk.

"Real Analysis at 8 AM tomorrow, it's Professor Zhang's class. If I don't show up for attendance, I'll lose all my participation points. I'd better wash up and go to bed."

Lu Jia glanced at the time, gasped, and quickly gathered the draft paper and the thick original book on the table together.

"I'm going to wash up."

Lu Jia picked up her wash cup and ran to the private bathroom.

Chen Zhuo smiled as he watched Lu Jia's hurried departure and said to Chu Ge.

"You should get some rest too. I see you've piled up a mountain of candy wrappers."

"Go to sleep now."

Chu Ge yawned and started to turn off the computer monitor.

Back to 215.

Wang Dayong had finished washing the clothes, and he hung the clean short-sleeved shirt on the clothesline in the sun.

Chen Zhuo walked to his desk and sat down.

Instead of washing up immediately, he opened the two thick mechanical assembly manuals on the table.

The page displays an internal perspective view of a turbofan motor, with various machining tolerances and material stress limits densely labeled next to it.