by Melissa Good
Dar took a breath, then released it. “Let’s go home and play with our new puppy,” she said. “I’ve had about enough pointless idiocy for the day.”
“You’re such a crusader.” Kerry felt the shaking in her knees relax as they walked back to the idling truck. “But you know, we really need to talk to Marcus tomorrow. Stuff like that’s just not cool.”
“Got that right.”
The cop car cruised past, slowing to watch them get in the truck and close the doors before they sped up again and continued down the road, pausing at the corner, then turning right and heading the direction both the men had.
Dar regarded the disappearing taillights then turned and looked at Kerry. “Maybe we do need to think about having a few security guards around.”
Kerry buckled her seat belt. “At least until your dad gets back in town.”
“Mm.”
THERE WAS ENOUGH done, and enough installed by the following afternoon for Dar to settle in at her desk, her new laptop on one side, her desktop on the other, and an 11 x 18 size pad of graph paper in front of her ready for her to start considering structure for their two projects.
It felt exciting. She was relaxed and comfortable, glad to be in jeans and a sweatshirt with its sleeves pushed up above her elbows, looking forward to an afternoon of high level design.
They had extended offers to five people, the network was all patched and ready to go, the DSL link was active, the WAPs were installed and working, and she was starting to hear the faint rattle and buzz of activity echoing softly in the halls.
She had light coming in behind her, and she uncapped the dark blue pen and sat for a minute, hand holding up her head as she considered how she wanted to start building these new things.
On the shelf across the room, there was a new music player that Kerry had installed for her, with a little remote control she could use from her desk. It was playing some quiet new age music now and she felt her body moving gently to it as she started to sketch out her design.
Logic symbols and boxes, shapes and arrows in a mental shorthand that truly only meant something to her, as she put down how this system should talk to that system, at what level, with what language. It wasn’t something she’d learned in school, rather, it was something she’d invented to be able to put down on paper her own way of getting things done.
Part diagram, part logic flow, part high level structure. It felt impossibly good to be sitting here in the quiet, with no screaming people or ringing telephones to interrupt her concentration.
Nice.
She started with Gerry’s project, boxing in the services he commanded and scribbling in their names, along with the systems each used to collect their data in a veritable cornucopia of neatly formed shapes. Then she paused and regarded them before she put a bigger box in the top center, labeling it with neat, precise capital letters.
Then she drew lines between the services and their programs and the box, turning her head a little sideways to write in the data stream types and languages the systems would be speaking.
Another box went below that, and then she spent five minutes or so writing in the intent of the system, along with lines that ended in circles, with names applied to all of them.
Then she sat back and studied it.
Wasn’t really that difficult a design. She drew in a makers box on the bottom and added the name of the system, her name, and systems architect after it, a smile appearing on her face as she filled in a few more details, glad she hadn’t lost her touch during the years she’s spent running things.
You could. She’d seen designers become project managers and lose the ability to go back to initiate things. But she’d done enough development and stuff on the side that she thought it wouldn’t take all that long for her to get that edge back.
Kerry came in, sipping from a bottle of ice tea. “Whatcha doing, hon?”
“Making Gerry’s plan,” Dar replied. “C’mere and I’ll show ya.”
Needing no prompting, Kerry came over and perched on the windowsill. “You’re writing it out longhand?”
“Sure,” Dar said. “Despite what Visio would have you believe, it’s actually easier to do this from scratch with a pen and a pad. So look.”
“I’m looking.”
“Six services. Each of them uses different databases. SQL, MySQL, Oracle, DB2, Sybase, and Informix.”
Kerry regarded the pad. “Are you actually telling me that they couldn’t decide on using the same database, any of them?” she asked in patent disbelief. “No way.”
“Yes way,” Dar said. “So, having them all talk to each other is pointless. We’d spend our entire time writing interfaces that stopped working as soon as they patched or upgraded.”
Kerry studied the paper. “So they all talk to the big box.”
“Mm. So we use this.” She pointed at the first square. “We use an enterprise service bus. It’s a universal translator. Takes input from all those systems, and rewrites it into a common structure.”
“Hm. I remember learning about them in school. We didn’t have one at ILS though,” Kerry said. “I remember seeing a test system at the college that let them bring in data from fake fast food joints.”
“No we didn’t,” Dar said. “I wouldn’t allow systems to be installed that weren’t a common interface. We used Oracle across the company because I told everyone if they tried using anything else they were going to pay for the enterprise support group out of their salaries.”
Kerry nodded. “I can picture that meeting,” she said. “There’s a point to standardization.”
“There is. You reduce your support matrix if you limit the needed skill sets,” Dar said, then paused. “Boy do I sound like a talking head or what?”
“I love your talking head. Feel free to try out your lectures on me anytime.”
Dar smiled. “Uh huh. So then, we put in a data warehouse.” She pointed to the second box. “The genius of this is that we strip the data of source, so it’s pure data. Then we can run analytics on it, and I’ll write a natural language report generator so they can just ask it questions and it will make the connections for them.”
Kerry studied the page, then looked at her. “You can do that?”
“I can do that. Listen, I know you’re more used to seeing me in an operations role, but I started as a programmer.”
“No, I know you did.” Kerry sat back. “I mean, I realized, just going day-to-day in the company, that there was an awful lot of stuff there that you personally created. I was just going wow in my head about the natural language thing. That’s hard.”
“It’s hard,” Dar agreed. “But I’ve been thinking about it for a while. We have to make it so that it’s not so hard for them to interact with these systems, so they feel comfortable with it. Otherwise they’ll just ignore it and go back to writing everything down on library cards.”
Kerry drew in a breath, appreciating this newly revealed facet of Dar. It was like getting to know her way back when, before she went on a personal track that would get her kudos and prestige. “That’s totally cool,” she said.
Dar grinned. “Glad you think so. I’m going to scan this in and put it in an official structure, then send it over for Gerry to run by his ops team. I don’t expect they’ll give me any grief over it.”
Kerry leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Awesome. So how long would it take a normal person to figure this out?”
Dar chuckled. “I’ve been doing this a while. Give me some credit for experience. Feels good to be doing it again. I missed being an architect. I figured that out after I did that new network.” She leaned back in her chair. “That’s why this whole new thing’s been so much fun.”
Ah. It was like music. “Totally glad to hear that, my love.” Kerry grinned. “I knew you weren’t happy there. You were in a box you didn’t much like, but you weren’t sure how to get out of. You couldn’t have gone back there.”
Dar nodded. “Right. Crazy making. Only thing th
at kept me from going nuts was you.”
Kerry ruffled her hair and then kissed the top of her head. “Love you.” She meandered around the desk and headed back for her own office, where she heard her gizmo ringing from where she’d left it. “Be back in a minute.”
Dar watched her until she disappeared, then returned her attention to her pad, adding a few more details before she got up and went to the scanner on the wall shelf. She triggered the scan and went back to her desk, watching the paper appear on her monitor.
It had come together fast, but then, she’d been thinking about it since the meeting, putting together ideas in her head she wanted to try and use to give Gerry the best result.
Because she really wanted to do that. The contract would have been hard to sell for ILS. They’d have had to build in far too much overhead to cover the contract costs. Here, it was much simpler, and she could work on building a support team after they got to a certain point.
She filtered the drawing into her diagramming program, a custom written set of code that did block and character analysis and produced a digital version of the drawing she’d done, complete with the writing, converted into a font that was a reasonable facsimile of her handwriting because she’d coded it that way.
She cleaned it up and removed the grid lines, then opened up the newly started mail program and connected it to the equally newly christened mail server.
Very raw and very basic. It wasn’t the pretty mail they’d used at ILS, but it encrypted the mail, and gave them email addresses in their new company domain. She looked up Gerry’s email address in her phone, and then she attached the plan and rattled off a few lines of basic explanation.
Then she sat back and studied the mail, unable to suppress a smile as she clicked send and watched the server obediently move it along its way.
Mark stuck his head in. “Hey, boss. I got the website set up. Figured we’d just go with NetSol and let them deal with the hassle until we’ve got a datacenter to house production stuff in.”
Dar nodded.
“So, it’s just basics.” Mark came over and pointed at the PC. “Dub dub dub RobertsAutomation.com. Go on and hit it.”
Obediently, Dar typed in their domain name, pleased when it came back with relatively snappy response. “Ah.” She regarded the screen that now showed a page in what was becoming their corporate colors, with the company logo on it and contact information. “Short and sweet.”
“We need a web guy to do stuff with it,” Mark said. “I just wanted to get the page up and secure the domain.”
“We’ll get that going.” Dar studied the generic page. “Give it some personality.”
“Yup,” he agreed. “You want anything added to that page? I still got my notepad open.”
Dar considered. It really was just a splash page, with a contact number she recognized as Kerry’s. That would change once their phone system was in. The address of the building was there, and under the About Us page was a listing of the startup crew with their titles.
Mark grinned. “Had to. I wanted it to be out in the world so I can tell my relatives to hit the page if they didn’t believe me.”
Dar chuckled. “Looks good for now. Custom application and system design. I like it.” She pushed the pad over to him “I just sent our first spec out to Gerry Easton. Let’s see if they like it.”
Mark sat down on the chair across from her desk and studied the pad. “You know what the coolest thing is?” he asked her. “Not getting two a.m. phone calls yet.”
“We’ll set up support groups for the service groups,” Dar said. “With some crossover, maybe contract a few overseas groups for follow the sun.”
“Yeah, but it’s gonna be freak-out city if they have an issue and we’ve got to call up ILS and bitch them out for network problems.” Mark’s eyes twinkled. “At least, for now.”
Dar’s eyes also twinkled. “For now,” she conceded. “Though, I really don’t want to be ILS. I want us to stay a little small so we can react to what’s going on. Look at all the businesses that tanked after 9/ 11—couldn’t change.”
“I was thinking that myself before,” he admitted. “How cool it was just to have a little crew here and everyone tight.”
“Nice to just be sitting here working on this stuff.” Dar smiled quietly. “Really nice to know my phone’s not going to ring and have some board jerk on the other end chewing my ass.” She drew the pad back and flipped the page over, considering the new clean space waiting for her imprint. “I was getting really tired of that.”
“Bet you were.” Mark got up. “Let me go get the backups going. We just got the library hooked up.” He circled the chairs and ambled out. “Later.”
“Later.” Dar tapped her pen against her pad, settling down with her chin on her hand again as she pondered the teal squares.
Bridges’s project would be different. She’d have to be very careful how she structured it, and there would be the issue of access. It would also require a natural language interface, but instead of the regulated structure of the databases, this would need to be able to handle the free form fire hose of data that was the Internet.
Slowly she sketched in several squares. Then she drew a mesh between them, but after a minute, she pulled off the page and crumpled it up. No, it couldn’t be modular. “Has to scale,” she muttered, drawing a bunch of circles, as she bounced in the chair a little, making it squeak.
Another crumple. The Internet was a distributed system. There was no central point, no one place it all went through.
Dar got up and went out to the antechamber, where Mayte was busy assembling a set of files behind her desk. “Hey, Mayte.”
She looked up and smiled. “Did you need something?”
“Just going to get a drink.” Dar rambled down the stairs, emerging on the bottom floor and ducking into the conference room where the drink cart was set up. She observed her choices, then selected a cup and got some coffee, adding a little cup of flavored creamer and stirring.
“Uh, hey.”
Dar turned to find the kid with the skateboard she’d seen the previous day standing in the doorway. “Hey.”
The kid looked half embarrassed, half annoyed. “I came here yesterday?”
“Right.” Dar focused on him. “Your father’s one of the carpenters. He sent you here to get a job.”
The kid looked relieved. “Yeah, right. So I was here yesterday, and they told me I had to come back today and talk to somebody about working here.”
Dar took a seat and waved him in. “I’m the somebody. C’mon in.”
He eyed her dubiously, but entered the room and put his skateboard down, sitting down in a chair across from her. “So I talked to this guy yesterday.”
Dar nodded. “Mark.”
“Yeah. So he talked to be about some security stuff.”
Dar studied him. “You want to do security stuff?”
He shook his head. “No, not really. It’s all cool, the hacker stuff and all that, and I guess it would be okay to look around for that stuff happening, but it’s kinda boring.” He paused. “If I want to do that I can just sit on the Internet at home or at the library.”
Dar counted herself highly entertained. “So what do you want to do?” she asked. The kid was about Kerry’s height, with sandy blonde hair, hazel eyes, and a smattering of freckles across his nose. His body under its cotton t-shirt and jeans was gawky and angular. “Or, what do you like to do?”
He considered her for a long minute. “I like to make stuff.”
“Hm.” Dar tilted her head a little. “Stuff like what? Like programs?”
He shrugged.
“Got some code with you?”
He held up a thumb drive.
“C’mon.” Dar got up and motioned him to follow her up the steps and back across the hall into her office. The antechamber was empty now, but she heard Mayte’s voice coming from Maria’s new office.
She circled her desk and held her hand out, taking the
drive and inserting it into the USB port in her laptop.
“They won’t run on that,” the kid said.
“Don’t want to run anything.” Dar sat down and pulled up her editing system. “I want to see the code.” She scanned the drive and selected a file, bringing it up in the editor and studying it.
The kid gave her a more interested look. “You program?”
Dar glanced up at him and nodded, then went back to the screen. She bumped the desk slightly with the chair, and her desktop screen came to life, but she ignored it while she concentrated on the text.
A soft chitter distracted her though, and she looked up to see Gopher Dar appear, doing a little dance across the screen. She chuckled softly and went back to the laptop.
“What’s that?” The kid asked, after a minute of silence.
Dar looked up. “What’s what?”
“That.” He pointed at Gopher Dar. “Is it a game?”
Dar leaned away from the laptop screen. “That’s a program. Doesn’t really have a purpose. Just a recreational thing.”
The kid got up and came over, peering at the screen. “Wow.” He watched Gopher Dar sashay across the desktop, waggling a finger at the two of them while it rambled around in a circle.
Dar moved her desktop mouse and clicked on him, and he jumped, turning and scowling at her.
“That’s some killer graphics.” The kid moved his nose almost up to the screen. “Look at the fingers! No jags or pixilation at all.”
“No, it’s all mathematic. Vector based,” Dar said. “Sees the screen as a grid, and interacts with everything it finds.”
Gopher Dar sat down and folded his arms over his chest, sticking his tongue out at them. Dar captured his tongue with the mouse and he grabbed at the pointer with both hands.
“Holy shit.” The kid almost crawled on top of the desk. “So this isn’t a game or anything?”
“No.” Dar regarded the little beast. “Just entertainment.”
“You could make a rad game with that,” the kid said. “Is it a wrapper? Could it work with like, a swordsman or something?”
“Probably. I’m not sure why I picked a gopher. Just because it was goofy looking probably.”