Read Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears for Free Online Page B

runts of the company. No executives or research and development engineers would ever be sentenced to the basement offices. It was enough to make him gnash his teeth sometimes.
    When Pete got back to his desk, he took solace in his lunch. His office space might suck, and his job might be unappreciated, but at least the food was good. Fresh gnocchi in a butter sauce, mixed salad greens, and a cup of gelatto in a special vacuum insulated cup that kept it cold while he ate his lunch. All organic and locally sourced, of course. The coffee wasn’t bad either, though it came from Kobos. Pete preferred Ristretto Roasters over Kobos, but of course only a few of Portland’s coffee roasters were big enough to supply Avogadro’s headquarters. Ristretto was one of the best micro-roasters in town. Pete’s wife, who was a tea drinker, couldn’t understand the Portland obsession with coffee.
    While he ate, Pete looked over his inbox. A new email caught his eye, and he opened it.
     
    To: Pete Wong (Internal Tools)
    From: John Anderson (Procurement)
    Subject: Email Procurement Forms
     
    Hi Pete,
     
    This is John Anderson. I work over in Procurement. Even though we’ve got a procurement web application that I know you guys created, we still get hundreds of email requests into the procurement department. Part of the problem is that we’ve got sales people in the field who can send emails from their smartphone, but have a hard time getting a secure VPN connection to the internal web sites. Is it possible to create an email-to-web bridge that would allow people to email us, and get a return form by email that they could submit to make requests? I mentioned this to Sean Leonov, and he said you guys could whip up something like this in a day or two.
     
    Thanks,
    John
     
    Pete Wong stared at this strange email. John Anderson, some guy in Procurement, was buddies with Sean Leonov, cofounder of Avogadro? Sean was a living legend at Avogadro. Pete hadn’t met anyone who knew Sean Leonov directly.
    Pete pondered the email. Why did Sean think that Internal Tools could implement this in a day? Was Sean Leonov even aware that there was an Internal Tools department at Avogadro? How had they gotten his email address? It all seemed so unlikely.
    It was a bizarre request, but it was true that he could pull it together easily. He imagined a salesperson working in the field, using their smartphone to access internal sites. Small screen, low bandwidth. The justification for the request made sense. And if doing this impressed Sean Leonov, well, that couldn’t hurt his career. Maybe he could get onto one of the real R&D project teams instead of being stuck in the dead-end Internal Tools department. Daydreaming of an office with sunlight pouring in big windows, he spent a few minutes lost in thought imagining what his office would look like with a big window overlooking the street, or even better, the river.
    With a start, he sat up straight and decided he could definitely spend a few minutes looking into the request. He eagerly put his fingers on the keyboard and starting searching. When his first Avogadro search for ‘email to web service’ within seconds turned up an existing design posted by some IBM guys, his excitement grew. After reading through the design, he realized he could implement it all in a couple of hours.
    His other work forgotten, Pete started in on the project. He used the existing Internal Tools servers, and created a new Ruby on Rails web application that converted web pages to emails, and emails into web page form submissions. It was easier than expected, and by lunch he had a simple prototype running.
    He tried the prototype on the Internal Tools Request tool, and discovered some bugs. Puzzling over the details in his head, he mindlessly rushed down the hall to the coffee station for a refill.
    * * *
    Mike left his office, nodded to a few teammates he passed, and headed downstairs for the nearest outside door. After banging his