Internal Networking

Circa 1999, Drake C was working on a video game for a large publisher. The game in question was a flight simulator with multiplayer dogfighting capabilities. Or at least, it was supposed to have multiplayer capabilities- in Drake's case, it just had a series of ugly crashes.

The networking library came from the publisher, so Drake reached out to Karl, the developer of said library. They spent some time going back and forth over the phone and email, trying to troubleshoot it. Eventually, Karl tapped out. "I'm stumped," he admitted, "but I'll tell you what, we've got another team working on Weighty Cogs II, and they've already got multiplayer working. I'll get them to send you their code, so you can take a look. Should have it to you by this afternoon."

"Oh," Drake said, "that'd be great. There's no rush, I've got plenty other tasks to work on, but yeah, if you can get that to me, that'd be super helpful."

Drake moved on to those other tasks, and made a note to follow up with Karl. Half an hour later, Karl sent an email. CCed was the Weighty Cogs II team lead, the WC2 product manager, a developer from WC2, and a name Drake didn't recognize. The body was brief: "Please send Drake the network code."

That itself kicked off another flurry of emails- another chain of names that Drake didn't recognize picked up the thread, forwarded the email around, kept Drake CCed on it, and just generally escalated through an obscure series of other owners, with the command: "Please put this together."

Days passed. Drake kept hacking away at the many other tasks he had to work on. Every once in awhile, those tasks brought him into contact with Karl again, and when he did, he'd always ask, "Hey, is there any progress on getting me that code? Still no rush, but just trying to check the status."

Karl would promise a follow up, and they'd continue.

The email thread continued to tick away. It got passed from hand to hand, gradually wending its way up the digestive track of the publisher, until it finally started tickling the tonsils of some VPs. The tone of the email chain went from, "we need to do this," to "why hasn't this happened yet?"

Outside of the email thread, there was a separate thread, involving those VPs, management, the entire Weighty Cogs II team, yet another development studio that was also doing a multiplayer game, and a few other odd names for good measure. This particular thread was a bit more panicked in tone, and lots of the information was getting lost. Suddenly, Drake hadn't simply accepted an offer of some network code from the WC2 team, he had demanded the entirety of the WC2 codebase. That team was from a different studio, so obviously they didn't want to just hand over all their code to a competitor. The publisher, however, didn't care what they wanted, since they owned all the rights. Somehow, the VPs had decided that this was on the critical path to hitting their release dates, and that if it didn't happen, Drake's project might be a complete failure. Which didn't endear Drake's team to the WC2 team at all- why should they bail out those failures?

After a lot of screaming, several contentious conference calls, and a few C-suite meetings, this panic trickled back down the organization to Drake's boss, Mikey.

Mikey stopped by Drake's cube. "Hey, Drake? Did you ask for the entirety of the Weighty Cogs II source code to be drop shipped on CD to you ASAP or we'd fail to ship?"

"What!? No!" Drake explained his request, and Mikey nodded.

"Okay, that makes sense. But you need to stop asking for it, because it's blown up to a thing."

Mikey and Drake chuckled about the absurdity of the situation, and Drake stopped poking Karl about the software.

The source code did finally arrive, at the start of the following week. It was shipped on CD, and the networking code was spaghettified into the game logic code, which both meant that it was difficult to trace, and also not reusable for Drake's task at all. But it did offer enough of an example that Drake could tell that his understanding of the networking library was correct. With that confidence, he was able to comb through his code until finally identifying the, in his words, "boneheaded mistake" in his code which caused the crash.

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