At the start, I had to choose one of four options, and I immediately picked the Brahmin from the cou

He recalled how, twenty years ago, in his university dormitory, he used an old computer with only 512 megabytes of memory to try to compress a high-definition animation downloaded from the campus network.

The animation's encoding format was extremely tricky. He tried every compression algorithm he could find on the market, but they were either too slow or resulted in too much loss of image quality.

Finally, he did something unconventional—instead of trying to improve any existing compression algorithm, he wrote a very simple preprocessing script that merged consecutive frames in the video with color changes less than a threshold into a static background before compression.

That script only took him one night to finish, but it improved compression efficiency by almost half.

Dr. He's hands suddenly began to tremble. He opened the code editor, created a new blank file, hovered his fingers above the keyboard for about three seconds, and then began to type code.

He typed very fast, almost like someone who was over forty years old, had spent years in technical management, and had neglected front-line programming.

The code on the screen stretched out line by line. He didn't make drafts, didn't draw flowcharts, and even added comments after finishing a section of code. Function names were clear, variable scope was strictly controlled, and the interface design of each module was as clean as tofu cut with a knife. Xiao Zhang, who was dozing at the next workstation, was awakened by the sound of the keyboard. He peeked out groggily and then instantly became wide awake.

"He Bo, what language are you speaking?"

"Rust".

Xiao Zhang blinked, making sure he hadn't misheard. Rust—a systems programming language known for its steep learning curve, with an ownership concept that would make even experienced C++ programmers question their existence.

Dr. He is certainly an experienced programmer, but his main technology stack is Python and C++. No one on the team knows when he learned Rust, let alone that he wrote a new pre-filtering module in Rust by himself at three in the morning.

Dr. He didn't explain. He simply spent the next three hours writing an extremely concise unstructured data preprocessing engine. The core idea of ​​this engine was consistent with the video compression script he had written twenty years ago—instead of trying to understand the full semantics of the data, it first used minimal computational cost to remove obviously irrelevant parts of the data, allowing the subsequent main matching engine to process only the truly valuable information.

He implemented this module in Rust because Rust's zero-cost abstraction and garbage-free mechanism can reduce the performance loss of this preprocessing stage to a negligible level.

At six o'clock in the morning, he connected the new pre-filter module to the test system and ran a complete load test.

The moment the result popped up on the screen, Dr. He took off his glasses, wiped the lenses with the hem of his shirt, put them back on, and looked at the numbers again.

Concurrent matching latency: 120 milliseconds.

Not seconds, but milliseconds. Importing 100,000 resumes simultaneously and performing semantic-level matching with thousands of job descriptions in the backend—from data entering the system to outputting the matching results—the entire process takes less than the blink of an eye. Previously, the team's best performance was nearly half a minute for 10,000 concurrent requests.

Dr. He took off his glasses and placed them next to the keyboard, then covered his face with his hands and rubbed them vigorously a few times. His eyes were a little sore, whether from staying up all night or something else, he didn't know. In the past two weeks, this team had completed a journey that would normally take half a year in just two weeks, in a way that he himself couldn't fully explain.

The graph neural network architecture reconstruction was done by Xiao Zhou, the thread pool optimization was discovered by Xiao Zhang, and his own pre-filtering engine was inspired by a memory from his university dormitory twenty years ago during a sleepless early morning.

Chen Qiming arrived at the office at seven in the morning. He habitually went to the break room to make himself a cup of instant coffee, then carried the cup to the whiteboard, ready to update yesterday's progress. Then he saw the stress test report on Dr. He's screen.

His hand, holding the coffee cup, froze in mid-air.

"Dr. He," his voice was calm, but his knuckles, holding the coffee cup, were slightly white, "has this data been reproduced?"

"Three rounds were reproduced. With 100,000 concurrent users, the average matching latency was 120 milliseconds, and the peak memory usage was less than 16GB. The pre-filtering module runs on an engine written in Rust, and the performance loss is less than 2% of the total call chain."

Chen Qiming put down his coffee cup without drinking it. He walked to Dr. He's workstation, bent down, and looked at the monitoring panel of the entire system. All the indicators were steadily within the green zone, and no curve showed any abnormal fluctuations.

He straightened up, remained silent for a moment, and then said the most unlike anything Dr. He had ever heard Chen Qiming say: "Take a day off tomorrow."

"What?"

"Everyone gets a day off." Chen Qiming picked up the whiteboard and erased all the architecture diagrams he had drawn, leaving only the largest box in the middle. Then he wrote a line in the box: "V2.0 underlying reconstruction completed, concurrency matching latency less than or equal to 150 milliseconds, entering the system integration testing phase next week."

After finishing writing, he tossed the marker into the pen holder, turned around, and looked at the young people in the office area whose dark circles were almost reaching their chins, but whose eyes were still frighteningly bright. "Submit the final code for each module before 6 p.m. today. After submitting, shut down your computers and go to sleep. This is an order, not a suggestion."

No one objected.

When Xiao Zhou took off his headphones, the cartoon girl in a sailor uniform on the screen had just completed a full rotation cycle. The physical simulation of the skirt was so precise that the changes in light and shadow in every frame were perfect.

He saved and committed the rendering pipeline, then shut down the code editor that had been running for two whole weeks. Before shutting down his server that was running the load test, Xiao Zhang took one last look at the CPU utilization curve—stable and quiet, like the breathing of a sleeping baby.

The office gradually quieted down after six o'clock. When the backlight of the last monitor went out, the sky outside the window had already transitioned from deep blue to a light, pale white.

Dr. He was the last to leave. He checked the Rust preprocessing engine code one last time, making sure that every line met the best standard he could, then closed his laptop and took a dusty cardboard box from the locked drawer at the bottom of the desk.

The cardboard box contained the limited-edition figurine set he had brought back from Akihabara when he was young.

The box had never been opened; he'd taken it with him during three moves. He placed the box on the table, looked at it for a long time, but ultimately didn't open it. He simply patted the box lightly, as if patting someone he'd known for decades but had never actually met.

Then he turned off the office lights.

Three days later, Li Xiao received a system integration report from Dr. Chen in the conference room of Lansheng Capital.