The Programming Story of Little Printf: Chapter 2

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Chapter 2 of "Little Printf's Programming Story": I finally met Little Printf in the story. What will happen between them? - Previous Chapter

Chapter 2

And so I started giving speeches all over the world, teaching others how to do things that sometimes I hadn't done myself, but everyone seemed to believe that I was a real programmer, precisely because of the things I did that had little to do with programming.

One day, I was heading home from a meeting and was stuck at the airport. I was typing furiously on my terminal when I heard a strange, soft voice asking me:

"Can you design a system for me?!"

"What?!"

“Design me a system!”

I was surprised by the request and looked up to see who asked it. I looked around and saw a kid standing not far away. He said he wanted to be a developer and asked me to call him "Printf". I thought the name was a bit silly and fancy. He looked like this:

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"I don't know much about computers, but you look like an expert. I want to write programs and let everyone know about them through blogs. Please, design a system for me!"

This was a surprising request, and I hadn't slept for 20 hours, so I wasn't sure I had heard him clearly. I told him that developing a system was difficult. I didn't know what he wanted the system to do, how to handle exceptions, how many readers it should support, and where to deploy it, so I couldn't design a good system for him in this situation.

"That doesn't matter. Just design a system for me."

There was no other way, so I drew him the following architecture diagram:

He looked at the diagram, shook his head and said, "This system isn't good enough. Let's design another one." I did:

And introduced to him the principles behind them one by one.

My new friend smiled politely. "That's not what I was looking for. It's too complicated and has too many features that I don't need."

I was a little unhappy because I had considered many factors, including redundancy, monitoring, backup, caching, load, external payment, failover backup, and rapid deployment. I could charge a lot of consulting fees just for this system design! Finally, I lost my patience and just drew him a picture:

Then he added, "This is the design you want. The system you want is in that black box." I hoped that this messy answer would keep him away from me. But his answer surprised me again:

“This is the design I wanted!”

That’s how I met little Printf.