Refactoring Junk

March 8, 2010, Women's Day, Monday.

At six o'clock in the morning, Lu Zhou woke up and finished his morning routine.

"Alright, time to go to work. Let's wait for easy money."

Before leaving, Lu Zhou glanced at Fang Qiang, who was sleeping on the couch, and couldn't help but sigh at how cute and naive his junior brother was.

Last night, Lu Zhou woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom because he had drunk too much water. He was surprised to see Fang Qiang still working on his laptop in the living room.

After completing his own work, Fang Qiang couldn't forget the miraculous coding techniques and ideas that Lu Zhou had shared in the afternoon. He continued studying the previous code while searching for information.

Lu Zhou didn't say much. It was a good thing for young people to be diligent, and he didn't want to dampen Fang Qiang's enthusiasm while he was still excited.

Shaking his head, Lu Zhou carried his bicycle downstairs, ready to go to work.

Currently, he had just been reborn, and he only had a small amount of money in his bank account, barely a few thousand yuan. The automatic registration process for his Weibo account would cost more than two thousand yuan per month, and there were also rent and daily expenses. If he really lost his job, this money would only last for a couple of months at most.

As Lu Zhou went downstairs, he noticed that the convenience store on the ground floor was closed. "It seems that Ye Qingchen has gone to class."

So Lu Zhou directly got on his bicycle and rode through the crowd on the road of Yixian University in Guangnan University City.

The company where Lu Zhou currently worked was called Huiteng Cloud, mainly engaged in server leasing and sales in the IDC business, but it was not strictly an internet company.

His job involved researching and implementing cloud computing virtualization services, data scheduling for virtual cloud servers, and automatic management.

It sounded quite advanced, but in his previous life, their department's research was never completed, and they didn't even see a prototype.

Huiteng gradually closed and disappeared in the wave of the era.

On the other side of the ocean, Amazon AWS had already launched Elastic Cloud Services in March 2006. By 2010, it had become a relatively mature technological field after several years of advancement, but there were not many companies actually using it.

In China, most of the imitators would eventually become dust in history.

"Alibaba started the first Double Eleven shopping festival in 2009, and WeChat's enterprise version is about to set sail next year. Everything seems coincidental yet inevitable. Double Eleven represents a sudden surge in high-performance demand at a specific time, requiring the temporary addition of a large number of servers. WeChat's disaster recovery servers in two locations and three data centers indicate the existence of idle servers for a long time. The initial purpose of Amazon opening the cloud was simply to rent out idle servers and increase revenue," Lu Zhou thought.

In the end, cloud computing was not just about cloud computing itself; servers were valuable assets.

This meant that only large-scale internet companies had the demand to adopt tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of servers, and their businesses had sudden high-performance requirements, which would give rise to true cloud computing enterprises.

This was true for Alibaba Cloud Computing a year later, true for Tencent Cloud Computing two years later, and true for Qiyun Cloud Computing four years later.

"In the end, nothing is without roots," Lu Zhou concluded with a transcendent perspective as he rode his bicycle.

Upon arriving at the company, it had been less than a month since the end of the Spring Festival holiday. The company's operations had not officially started, and the office was filled with yawning.

Lu Zhou looked around, recognizing some colleagues with whom he could still occasionally have a conversation, others who were strangers and had only spoken about work since joining, and some whom Lu Zhou couldn't even remember their names.

Among the many colleagues, he was more familiar with his team leader, Wen Pangzi, and they even started a business together later on.

Of course, calling Wen Pangzi a team leader was just because he joined the company a year earlier than Lu Zhou.

After all, cloud computing was still a relatively new field in China. Even the three giants had not yet opened their services, and most talents were either transitioning from operations and maintenance or starting as fresh graduates.

At this moment, a call came from another cubicle, "Lu Zhou! Come here for a moment."

Lu Zhou put down his backpack and went over to Wen Xuxiu's workstation. "Haha, Big Bro Wen, long time no see. What's up? Do you need anything?"

"Enough. I just took a look at your progress last week, and you've written a bunch of garbage. I tested several functions, and the code runs fine, but the optimization is unbearable, little brother."

Lu Zhou rubbed his forehead in embarrassment. It turned out that Wen Xuxiu couldn't stand the junk code written by his predecessor.

After all, Wen Pangzi himself was a technology enthusiast who loved research. He did everything he could to optimize the code, whether working overtime or at home, striving for perfection without seeking a raise.

Lu Zhou had to admit that many of his work habits in his past life were greatly influenced by Wen Xuxiu. Wen Xuxiu had helped him develop the right coding habits.

Due to his accumulated knowledge and his passionate pursuit of technology, Wen Pangzi changed jobs to Alibaba Cloud Computing two years later.

Wen Pangzi bombarded Lu Zhou with criticism about the code he had written, explaining the train of thought behind it.

"Why does this feel like yesterday when I was explaining it to Fang Qiang..." Lu Zhou muttered to himself.

Seeing that Wen Xuxiu was getting more and more excited while explaining, Lu Zhou felt helpless.

In the end, he could only throw out a few cloud computing ideas related to the future and ask Wen Xuxiu to explain them to him.

This caught Wen Pangzi off guard, and he furrowed his brow in deep thought. Meanwhile, Lu Zhou quietly returned to his own workstation, opened his computer, and prepared to refactor the code he had written before.

"I never realized how terrible it was until I took a look. No wonder Wen Pangzi is so enthusiastic about explaining it. I can't even stand it myself. This refactoring will keep me busy for a while. I'll make the changes in my local repository first, and then gradually commit them, to avoid causing a sensation." Lu Zhou criticized himself as he wrote.

Lu Zhou spent the whole day refactoring the code, except for short breaks for going to the restroom and having lunch. He was mostly hunched over his desk reconstructing the code.

It wasn't until Wen Xuxiu called Lu Zhou downstairs for dinner that he realized it was already the end of the workday.

Wen Xuxiu glanced at Lu Zhou's screen and exclaimed, "Kid, I only said a few words to you this morning. You didn't have to refactor the entire section you were responsible for. Hmm? Wow... The refactoring of this function you did is amazing!"

Lu Zhou chuckled as well. It turned out that Wen Pang's comments in the morning were just meant to give him some ideas, and he didn't expect Lu Zhou to actually take on the challenging and thankless task of code refactoring. But he still laughed it off, saying, "Haha, as you said, strive for perfection in everything."

Wen Xuewei awkwardly rubbed his face with his fingers and said, "Well, you handle it then. I don't have much to do for now. I can help you with the refactoring tomorrow. Let's go, it's time to have dinner after work."

They went to a fast-food restaurant downstairs from the company and ordered a plate of farmhouse-style stir-fried pork. While waiting for their food, they discussed several technical ideas that Lu Zhou had shared with Wen Xuewei.

Wen Xuewei seemed bewildered and muttered to himself, "The previous junk code was probably written with their feet. But the refactored code and these ideas are top-notch, really impressive."

Lu Zhou jokingly replied, "Well, well, well. You have to wait and see. You have to wait and see." Lu Zhou's Nokia 5800 played the classic ringtone, and for the first time since his rebirth, he felt a sense of nostalgia hearing that sound.

Seeing that it was Fang Qiang's call, Lu Zhou answered the phone. Before he could say anything, Fang Qiang immediately shouted, "Oh my god, Lu Brother, big news, big news!"

The loud shout made Lu Zhou move the phone away from his ear and say, "Lower your voice, you've shattered my eardrums. What's the matter, is there a problem with the program?"

Lu Zhou chuckled and made a joke, "Either there are orders coming in, and the scheduled task of the automatic registration machine coincided with the orders from the automation system. Both programs consumed too much server performance, resulting in a 502 error in the admin panel. Or it's because of the crappy code you wrote, and it caused a bug. It's one of the two."

Fang Qiang on the other end of the line was speechless for a moment and then said, "Lu Brother, you're so clever and you still managed to mock me. Looks like I have no friends left."

"Alright, tell me how many orders there are. The program itself doesn't consume many resources. Without seventy or eighty orders, the admin panel wouldn't crash."

After a brief pause, Fang Qiang let out another shout and said, "Ah, Brother Lu, you can't be fooled. There are a total of seventy-five orders! Haha, we did it!"

Lu Zhou was also elated and couldn't help but smile. He thought to himself that the advertisement campaign with Ali's flagship store had indeed been effective in the early stages. At least for buyers with similar purchasing needs, Lu Zhou's store prices were quite attractive.

"What a successful launch. It's not a problem. I'll upgrade the server configuration later and get you a backup server. We'll discuss the rest when I get back." Lu Zhou then hung up the phone.

Wen Xuwei, who was next to him, listened with astonishment. "Wow, Boss Lu, your business is booming. The servers are exploding."