Chapter 184: Morning Meeting and Boundaries

The alarm went off at exactly six-thirty. Lin Chen opened his eyes. There was a water stain on the ceiling, shaped like a stretched-out map. He sat up, and when his left foot touched the floor, a dull ache ran through the muscle beneath the bandage. With practiced hands, he removed the old gauze, replaced it with fresh dressing, wrapped it tight, and tied it off. His movements never paused. His breathing stayed even.

He washed up, shaved, and put on the navy-blue polyester-cotton shirt that had cost forty-five yuan. The collar was still a little stiff, scraping against his neck. He slipped his notebook into his backpack and pulled the zipper shut. Before leaving, he crossed October 16 off the calendar on the folding table.

Morning in the urban village began with the white steam rising from coal stoves and soy milk carts. Avoiding the puddles on the road, he walked to the subway station. At rush hour, the turnstiles were packed—suits, work uniforms, and school uniforms all mixed together, the air heavy with sweat and cheap perfume. He tapped his card, entered the station, and was shoved along by the crowd onto the train. There were no seats. He grabbed an overhead strap and shifted most of his weight to his right leg. His left foot hovered above the floor, swaying lightly with the motion of the carriage. He closed his eyes and ran through the development environment paths he had configured the night before: the JDK bin directory, Maven's settings.xml, Git's SSH keys. The paths were as clear as coordinates, giving him a strange sense of steadiness in that swaying, sealed space.

At eight-thirty, he got off at Technology Park Station. The glass curtain walls of the office buildings reflected the early autumn sunlight—harsh, but sharply defined. He went to the front desk, showed his offer email and his ID card, and received a temporary employee badge. The plastic card was light. Printed on it were his name and the words "R&D Department - Intern." He hung it around his neck and stepped into the elevator.

The R&D floor on the third level was already full. The clatter of keyboards, the clicks of mice, and low-voiced conversations braided together into a sheet of white noise. The air smelled of coffee and printer paper. Lin Chen found his workstation: dual monitors and an office chair on casters. He set down his bag, plugged in the power, and turned the machine on. The screen lit up with the company's standard blue wallpaper. He connected to the internal network and waited for IT to grant his permissions. While waiting, he studied the room around him: someone in noise-canceling headphones staring at a monitor, someone else with a mug in hand sketching an architecture diagram on a whiteboard, another person on the phone quietly explaining an API change. There was none of the cinematic fervor people liked to imagine—only a dense, repetitive rhythm of production, chopped into billable hours.

At nine sharp, Director Li clapped his hands. "Morning meeting. Conference room on the third floor."

Lin Chen closed his laptop and followed the flow of people into the meeting room. Seven or eight people sat around the long table, some in plaid shirts, some in polo shirts. Director Li stood in front of the whiteboard with a black marker in his hand.

"Log collection module V1.0. Deadline is next Friday. The requirements document was sent out last night. Main flow is client reporting, gateway reception, asynchronous disk writes, scheduled cleanup. I don't care if the architecture is elegant, but it has to be stable. Exception handling needs to be comprehensive. Log format follows company standards—don't reinvent the wheel. If you hit a blocker, sync in the group chat immediately. Don't bury your head and hack away alone." Director Li spoke quickly, without any small talk, going straight to the point. "Lin Chen, you're responsible for the gateway reception and asynchronous disk-write portion. Old Zhang, walk him through the conventions in the existing codebase. Meeting adjourned."

The meeting lasted seven minutes. Back at his desk, Lin Chen opened the requirements document. The PDF was neatly laid out, but the technical details were full of blank spaces. In the section on exception handling, for instance, it only said, "log the error and retry," without defining the retry count, backoff strategy, or maximum queue length. In the section on log rotation, it mentioned only "daily splitting," without specifying disk thresholds or cleanup priority.

He created a new text file named req_questions_v1.txt. One by one, he listed the ambiguities and attached his preliminary proposals. When he finished, he took his water cup and walked over to Old Zhang's desk.

"Brother Zhang, sorry to bother you. The requirements don't clearly define the boundaries for the retry mechanism and disk cleanup. My initial thought was to add an exponential backoff algorithm, and when the queue fills up, drop the oldest logs directly to avoid a memory overflow. What do you think?"

Old Zhang looked up from his screen and pushed his glasses up his nose. He glanced at Lin Chen's notes and smiled. "Not a bad idea, but don't rush into algorithms. What the business side wants is for the data to come through—just don't lose it. Retry three times, one second apart. That's enough. If the queue fills up, log a warning and keep writing. If the disk fills up, ops will get an alert. That's not your problem. Remember this: version one is about getting it to run, not refactoring. If the code runs and the tests pass, it's good code."

Lin Chen nodded without arguing. He went back to his seat and trimmed down the proposals in req_questions_v1.txt, leaving only the simplest logic. At the end of the file, he added a note:

Business priorities come before technical fastidiousness. Deliver first, iterate later.

At ten-thirty, he wrote his first line of production code.

The company's framework was heavily wrapped, with long inheritance chains. Following the documentation Old Zhang had given him, he found the relevant base class and overrode receive() and flush(). The network layer used NIO to avoid blocking; for disk writes he used RandomAccessFile in append mode. He wrote slowly. Every time he finished a method, he checked the internal API documentation to confirm parameter types and return values. When he ran into uncertainty, he stopped asking and wrote unit tests instead. He used mock data to simulate client reports, ran them, and watched the console output.

Error, revise, run again. The red warnings in the terminal gradually thinned out, while the green Tests passed messages began to multiply. Out of habit, he opened work_rules.log and wrote down the pitfalls he had discovered:

1. The internal framework's ConnectionPool defaults to a 5-second timeout and must be explicitly overridden. 2. The asynchronous thread pool must have a rejection policy specified, or tasks will be silently dropped under high concurrency. 3. Do not use reflection for log serialization; the performance cost is too high. Use hard-coded field mapping instead.

At noon, he went downstairs to the convenience store and bought a rice ball and a bottle of mineral water. Back at his desk, he ate while reviewing code Old Zhang had committed. There were few comments, and the variable names were heavily abbreviated, but the logic was tight, and every exception branch had been handled without a leak. He realized that code at school pursued correctness, while code here pursued controllability. Correctness was a theoretical value. Controllability was an engineering one.

By three in the afternoon, his left foot had begun to swell. The bandage bit into the flesh, slowing circulation. He put a discarded cardboard box under his foot and adjusted his posture. The pain did not disappear, but it was compressed into background noise. All his attention remained fixed on the cursor on the screen.

At five-forty, the core logic was done. He ran the integration tests once more. Reporting, parsing, writing to disk, rotation—the entire chain passed. He let out a long breath, saved the code, and committed it to his Git branch. The commit message was restrained:

feat: implement foundational logic for log reception and asynchronous disk writes

By six-thirty, people in the office were leaving one after another. Lin Chen was still organizing his unit test cases when Director Li came over with a cup of coffee and stopped behind him.

"Got it running?" "The main flow works. I'm still filling in the edge cases." "Code review tomorrow at ten in the morning. Bring the exception branches and log format into line with the standards. Also—" Director Li pointed to the monitoring panel in the corner of the screen. "An old online module is reporting a memory leak. The logs are on the shared drive. Take a look tonight and get familiar with the troubleshooting process. No need to rush into a fix. Just understand it first."

"Got it." Lin Chen nodded.

Director Li patted him on the shoulder and turned away.

Lin Chen opened the shared drive and found the log file. Several megabytes of text, dense with stack traces. He dragged it to local storage and used grep to filter for OutOfMemoryError. The errors were concentrated between two and four in the afternoon, accompanied by a large number of database connection timeouts. Following the call chain downward, he found an unclosed ResultSet object accumulating inside a loop. The connection pool filled up, new requests backed up in line, and the JVM was eventually dragged down with it.

He opened a notepad and sketched out the call graph. The problem was clear, but fixing it would mean touching the underlying DAO layer, a broad and risky change, and there were no existing test cases to cover it. He noted the location and closed the file. Instead of changing the code immediately, he organized the troubleshooting path and dependency relationships into a document named memleak_analysis_v1.md.

At seven o'clock, he packed his bag, turned off the lights, and left the office.

The subway at evening rush hour was even more crowded than in the morning. He leaned against the connection between two carriages. His left foot was already numb. His phone screen lit up with a text from his mother:

"Xiaoman's medicine is almost gone. The pharmacy in town says the price will go up next month. Is work going all right for you over there? Don't wear yourself out."

He stared at the line of text, his finger hovering over the screen. He typed a few words into the reply box, then deleted them. In the end, he sent only one sentence:

"Everything's fine. I get paid on the fifteenth next month. I'll cover the medicine."

Message sent. He put the phone away and looked up through the window. The lights in the tunnel ran together into a flowing golden line, sweeping rapidly backward. He knew that tomorrow there would be a code review, production incidents, and more unwritten rules that had never made it into any requirements document. But he was already sitting in this chair.

The cursor on the screen was quietly waiting for the next press of the Enter key. And that memory leak log, like an unsolved piece of a puzzle, had already begun reassembling itself in his mind. Tomorrow at ten, he would need to walk into the meeting room carrying an answer.