Chu Ge slapped his thigh.
"The concept is definitely new. I also think if this thing could actually be built, it would absolutely grind all those current BBS forums that are nothing but spam into the dust."
"If you think it’s so great, what are you two arguing about?"
"The underlying architecture!"
Just mentioning it made Chu Ge’s temper flare up again.
He spun back around, dragged the mouse quickly across the screen, and pointed to a few lines of code.
"That bastard understands product design, but his code logic is a complete disaster! He posted the backend database architecture he came up with in the thread, and he actually wants to use nested queries in a relational database to traverse a user’s friend list!"
The more Chu Ge spoke, the more agitated he became, kicking his swivel chair back half a meter.
"Just think about it! Ten friends in the first degree, a hundred in the second, a thousand in the third! He wants to use SELECT statements and nested loops in the database, digging through it layer by layer! I replied to him directly in the thread. I said, ’Your logic might work fine for ten people in a closed beta, but the moment you have over ten thousand users and one of them tries to search for a third-degree friend, your server will burn to a crisp in the server room!’"
Chen Zhuo pictured the kind of exponential explosion a nested query algorithm like that would cause and nodded in deep agreement.
"That would definitely be rough on the servers. Sounds like a real hardware killer."
Chen Zhuo offered a very fair assessment.
"Right?!"
Chu Ge slammed his hand on the desk as if he’d found a kindred spirit.
"I was just trying to give him a friendly warning, and you know how the bastard replied?"
Chu Ge reached out, spun the mouse wheel to scroll the page down, and pointed to a reply that was bolded and highlighted.
Chen Zhuo leaned in for a closer look.
The reply was just a single line.
"Typical code monkey mindset. You only stare at computing power and the underlying framework. Before the core product logic is even working, over-optimizing the backend is a waste of time. You have no idea what user growth is."
Chen Zhuo couldn’t help but let out a soft laugh.
That sentence had perfectly stepped on every landmine of Chu Ge’s identity as a hardcore, self-taught geek.
"He called me a code monkey!"
Furious, Chu Ge spat the flattened plastic stick into the trash can by his desk, then unwrapped an orange-flavored lollipop from the jar and stuck it in his mouth.
"You think my temper would let him get away with that? I immediately spent three hours writing a traversal script in C with low-level pointer optimization. I posted it right in my reply to show him what the art of code is, to show him what real algorithmic efficiency looks like."
Chen Zhuo looked at the long, yet extremely concise, block of optimized code on the screen, then turned to look at Chu Ge.
"And then?"
"And then?"
Chu Ge rolled his eyes and pointed to the latest reply.
"The bastard took my code and ran a test. Then he replied saying it was indeed three times faster, but the memory leak issue wasn’t solved, and told me to fix it."
Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair, touching the back of his hand to his lips to hide a smile.
"Chu Ge, have you noticed?"
Chen Zhuo’s tone was gentle, with a hint of playful matter-of-factness.
"You’re basically working as a freelance coder for him for free. He hasn’t even paid you a deposit."
Chu Ge’s lollipop-chewing suddenly stopped.
He stared at Chen Zhuo, blinked twice, his mouth slightly agape, as if the logic had only just hit him.
"Fuck me..."
Chu Ge let out an annoyed groan and slapped himself on the forehead.
"You’re right. How did I let him sucker me into this? I was so focused on winning the argument that I’ve written the underlying scripts for three of his core modules for free over the past two weeks!"
Seeing Chu Ge’s crestfallen expression, Chen Zhuo smiled and prepared to stand up and head back to his own dorm.
Just then, an extremely crisp DING came from the computer.
Chu Ge glanced down at the bottom-right corner of the screen.
In the bottom-right corner of the Shuimu BBS webpage, a notification for a new private message had popped up.
The sender was the very same IP from the Capital City that Chu Ge had been butting heads with for the last two weeks.
Chu Ge clicked open the message.
The message was short, with no unnecessary fluff—just a string of letters and a few words.
"Add me on MSN. Don’t you dare log off."
Chu Ge stared at the line of text, his previous frustration vanishing in an instant. A grin slowly spread across his face—a smile of extreme confidence tinged with excitement.
"The bastard. He finally swallowed his pride and sent a private message."
Chu Ge’s fingers flew as he moved the mouse, clicking the MSN icon on his desktop.
It was the logo of two little green figures intertwined.
Log in, add friend, enter the username.
The other person was clearly waiting by their computer. The friend request was accepted less than two seconds after he sent it.
A chat window popped up on the screen.
The other person’s name was simple: just the single word, Xing.
Chen Zhuo stood by without leaving, watching the two of them begin to clash rapidly in the chat window.
Xing: "That memory-reclamation mechanism you posted this afternoon has a deadlock vulnerability. During concurrent access, if the pointer isn’t released, the server will still crash."
Chu Ge’s hands returned to the keyboard, his typing speed so fast it left afterimages.
Chu Ge: "That was a compromise to accommodate your garbage table structure! If you dared to split the primary key index, I could make it twice as fast again, with absolutely no deadlocks."
The other side went silent for about ten seconds.
At the top of the chat window, the status indicator showed the other person was typing...
Xing: "How would you split it?"
Chu Ge let out a triumphant snort, the lollipop in his mouth spinning rapidly.
He began to type out long paragraphs in the chat window, detailing his ideas for splitting the database, effortlessly rattling off all sorts of technical terms and low-level logic.
Chen Zhuo stood to the side, watching the chat log scroll by continuously.
These two people—one in a rented room somewhere in the Capital City’s Zhongguan Village, his head full of bringing the latest social networking models from Silicon Valley back to the country; the other in a men’s dorm in Huizhou, chewing on a lollipop, using his hardcore, low-level coding skills to patch up the holes in those pie-in-the-sky theories.

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