Reborn in 2000, starting from the university website

The conference room of Qihang Technology was packed with nearly fifty people. The air was so stuffy it felt like a sauna. Even with the central air conditioning set to its coldest setting, it couldn't keep up. The projector's fan was humming loudly.

Liu Zhi stood in front of the whiteboard, his finger tracing a circle in the air before finally touching the screen, where a steep user growth curve appeared.

"Mr. Bai, everyone, aside from the architecture restructuring, our most pressing task right now is dealing with the load during the holiday. Based on our operational experience in Shenzhen, we expect a surge in traffic around May Day, a week from now. Judging by the growth trend, we simply can't handle it." Liu Zhi pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses, his tone carrying the reserve and arrogance that comes with a large team. "To handle it smoothly, we need to follow industrial-grade standards: physical isolation, load balancing, and stress testing—none of these can be omitted."

He flipped to a slide, and there it was—a densely packed purchasing list.

"Here's the solution. It requires twenty Dell tower servers, a redeployment of the database middleware, and three rounds of end-to-end stress testing." Liu Zhi sighed. "The budget is 600,000, and the fastest timeframe is one week. That's the bottom line."

"A week?"

The mineral water bottle in Zhang Jian's hand cracked as he squeezed it, and the plastic bottle shriveled up.

He looked up abruptly, his eyes bloodshot: "Manager Liu, look at the calendar! There are only eight days left until May Day. By the time you finish this week of work, the server will have crashed, and all the users will have left! Are you here to put out a fire or to do renovations?"

Liu Zhi frowned deeply, clearly disliking this "technical director" who reeked of sweat and spoke nonsense.

"Director Zhang, doing tech isn't child's play, much less gambling." Liu Zhi capped his pen, making a crisp sound. "If we don't follow the procedures and something goes wrong online, we won't even be able to roll back. Who will take responsibility if millions of users and their data collapse? You?"

"You..." Zhang Jian's face turned bright red, and the veins on his neck bulged. He wanted to slam his fist on the table and curse, but the "risk control," "closed loop," and "SLA standards" that the other person was spouting were like a wad of cotton, leaving him unable to muster any strength.

He subconsciously looked towards the head of the table.

Bai Yuhang leaned back in his chair, fiddling with a lighter in his hand that had some paint chips on it. The flame flickered and went out, reflecting on his unreadable face.

The situation has reached a stalemate.

The air was thick with a sense of unease.

At this moment, Zhang Xiaolong, who had been huddled in the shadows in the corner, staring blankly at the computer screen, suddenly moved.

He didn't say a word or even look at Liu Zhi. He picked up his laptop, got up, and walked straight to the projector.

"Sizzle—"

A piercing electrical buzzing sound.

Before Liu Zhi could react, Zhang Xiaolong yanked the VGA cable connecting his laptop to the projector.

On the screen, the beautifully designed PowerPoint presentation with blue background and white text instantly disappeared, replaced by a DOS interface with black background and white text—no charts, no fluff, just hundreds of lines of densely packed, well-structured code.

"Allen, what are you doing?" Liu Zhi was annoyed and felt offended.

"A week is too long, seize the day."

Zhang Xiaolong's voice was hoarse; his voice, worn from years of smoking and fuming, was loud enough to instantly silence a pin drop in the noisy conference room.

His fingers slid across the touchpad, the cursor like a scalpel, precisely cutting into a core logic.

"Your solution is about piling on hardware, which is a dinosaur-era approach. Our bottleneck now isn't the machines, but the data transmission and I/O model." Zhang Xiaolong pointed to the characters flashing on the screen. "This is the communication layer I rewrote last night. I cut all the multi-threaded synchronous queues that could cause blocking and replaced them with single-threaded asynchronous I/O, along with the data compression algorithm that Bai wrote earlier."

He turned to look at Liu Zhi, his eyes calm, even somewhat wooden, yet Liu Zhi felt an unprecedented sense of oppression.

"The data packet size has been compressed by two-thirds, and the concurrent processing capacity will increase tenfold. We don't need to buy new machines, nor do we need a week, nor do we need to conduct any three rounds of stress testing. The code will be merged at midnight tonight, the service will be restarted, and the existing twenty-odd servers in the Shenzhen Telecom data center will handle five million concurrent users with ease."

Liu Zhi stood there, stunned.

He knows his stuff.

Although he had been in management for many years, his fundamentals remained. Staring at the long, minimalist, and elegant lines of code on the screen, his pupils contracted sharply.

There are no redundant judgments or complicated locking mechanisms; the data flow is as smooth and seamless as mercury spilling onto the ground.

This isn't code, this is a work of art.

"This...this closed-loop logic..." Behind Liu Zhi, a technical backbone from Shenzhen couldn't help but stand up, lean in front of the screen for a long time, and finally uttered a curse, "This is absolutely brilliant."

The conference room was completely silent, except for the sound of the computer case fan spinning.

The elites who were just moments ago gesturing and talking eloquently with their PowerPoint presentations now looked as if they had been choked, their arrogance crumbling into unbelievable awe.

Sitting in the chair, Zhang Jian looked at the cold sweat beading on Liu Zhi's forehead and finally felt a surge of anger subside.

He slapped his thigh hard, the sound deafening: "See that? That's called a dimensional reduction attack! Allen's awesome!"

Sparse applause broke out, and the Shenzhen team members looked at each other, their faces burning with embarrassment.

The time is right.

"Smack."

Bai Yuhang slammed the lighter down on the table, the crisp metallic clang ending the farce.

"Alright." He stood up, walked over to Zhang Xiaolong, patted the expert on the shoulder, and glanced at the entire room. "At Qihang, no matter how beautiful the PPT is, it's useless. What matters is that the code runs. Manager Liu, we're all tech people. There's no shame in listening to whoever is better."

Liu Zhi took a deep breath, closed his laptop, and bowed his head to Zhang Xiaolong: "I give up. Mr. Zhang, we'll cooperate with you going online tonight."

This act of bowing down completely shattered the arrogance of the Shenzhen team.

"That's right." Bai Yuhang smiled, his tense aura instantly relaxing. "Everyone has come all the way from Shenzhen to Beijing, not to listen to me make empty promises. Since we're family, there has to be something tangible."

He held up two fingers, speaking casually as if he were discussing what to have for dinner: "Starting this month, everyone's salary will be increased by 20%. In addition, the company has set up a special bonus pool. If we successfully navigate the May Day campaign and complete the feature updates according to the development plan, we will reward everyone at the end of the year based on their contributions."

The Shenzhen team, which had just been feeling down because they were outmatched technically, suddenly erupted into chaos.

"20%? Really?"

"There's a bonus too?"

In this harsh winter of the bursting dot-com bubble and widespread layoffs and pay cuts, Bai Yuhang's generous offer of carrots shattered the last remaining barriers between these people.

"Follow General Bai, and you'll get to eat meat!" Zhang Jian seized the opportunity to stir up trouble, his smugness impossible to hide.

Looking at the excessively young boss in front of him, and then at the taciturn yet unfathomable Zhang Xiaolong beside him, Liu Zhi's last shred of professional composure completely crumbled.

He picked up his pen again, opened his notebook, and wrote a line heavily:

Data compression algorithm, asynchronous I/O.

"Alright, let's get to work." Bai Yuhang waved with a smile. "Tonight, let's show the nation's netizens what true launch speed is."