Coder Lee Yongho - Chapter 81

Coder Lee YongHo – Chapter 81: Tutor (1)

Silicon Valley.
Land of hopes and dreams.
As a region in San Francisco, California, USA, it was named as such due to the fact that silicon chip production companies were gathered here.
Stanford university, a world-class university, was here and companies, which were incomparably more well-known than the big companies in Korea, were everywhere.
However, what YongHo was surprised at was something else.
House prices.
No matter how hard he looked, there wasn’t a place with a rent lower than 2 million won (converted to Korean currency, ≈1740 USD) a month. And what there were were all tattered down, perhaps due to the low pricing.
In the end, he decided to live in Dave’s house until he found a room he was satisfied with.

After moving all his luggage, YongHo asked the most urgent question.
“Dave, do you not there are enough people around to learn English?” (T/N: Dave, is there perhaps anyone around I can learn English from?)
YongHo stuttered his words he read down from an internet translator.
“English?”
“Yeah, a person to teach me English.”
After thinking for a moment, Dave took out a familiar name.
“Jessie can do that. Jessie.”
“Jessie?”
“Yes, Jessie likes languages a lot. As far as I know, she enjoys learning other countries’ languages other than just programming language.”
“Really?”
When he heard Dave’s words, YongHo became curious. If he could learn English from Jessie, then the money to hire a tutor would decrease.
With just the 120,000 dollar annual salary, he wouldn’t have anything left after living for one year.
The basic tax rate on his monthly salary was 25%.
And another 10% was taken off as retirement pension called the 401k. If he left Dave’s house and grabbed a single room apartment, then about 2 million won would leave him monthly.
He had to grab Jessie.
“She probably has a lot of interest in Korean as well. Talk to her well.”
Dave spoke long, but what YongHo heard were just few words. ‘Korean’, ‘Interest’, ‘Talk’. Anyway, he interpreted as ‘talk to her’.”
Coincidentally, Jessie’s house was not far away from Dave’s house.

(T/N: From now on, it may be really confusing, as Jessie speaks in poor Korean, which I have to translate poor Korean in to poor English(?)…and YongHo speaks in native-level Korean, which I have to translate to native-level English(?)… wtf)

YongHo was looking at Jessie with a nervous expression. It was unknown how many times he had to look things up on the internet to explain. He searched words in the internet to confirm if he spoke properly and for sentences, he explained using a machine translator.
“You don’t have to do English much. I know some Korean.”
Jessie replied with Korean, though lacking. YongHo could only be surprised.
“Huh?”
“I interested in Korean. I’m good.”
“Th, then should we start tomorrow?”
Okay.
Now that he was worried less about English problems, YongHo thought that he just needed to work.

***

The main task of the BI team which YongHo belonged to was algorithm tuning. It could be said that the final objective was to induce customers into buying more products by analyzing the patterns of the users through the company website.
First.
This was how Dave introduced YongHo to the company people. The career experience of being first on the NetFlax Prize were engraved into their minds.

First conference, YongHo couldn’t say anything. It was difficult to just understand what they were saying, but speaking was even harder.
“……”
“Nothing is much. They say hello.”
Fortunately, as Jessie was interpreting their words from time to time, he could nod his head once or twice.
Dave had a positive attitude towards YongHo so he conversed with him with body language. Although it took a long time, Dave tried to understand him and listen to him.
Of course the company was the same.
As it was only the beginning, an atmosphere, where they understood and accepted him to an extent, was created.
Dave’s influence was big in there.
YongHo was a person who even Dave, who was acknowledged by Jungle, recommended. Although there were many cases where he mad people awkward due to his pure actions, his ability alone was exceptional.
Such Dave had acknowledged him so, despite the fact that they couldn’t communicate, they had accepted YongHo.
Dave tapped YongHo, who was spacing out amidst all the uninterpreted language.
“Explain it to the people.”
Dave urged YongHo, who was just nodding his head like a doll. It seemed that they were urging him to explain about the algorithm that took 1st place.
‘…This is not good.’
He couldn’t explain. It wasn’t that YongHo had become smarter. He could just see bugs happening in a program.
Algorithm requires mathematical knowledge. Especially, with data analysis algorithms, one even needed statistics knowledge.
This was a field that YongHo was weakest with. If he had such a genius ability, then he would have left Shinseki long time ago.
However, he had come until this point believing in the bug window, which came like thunder, and may disappear like thunder.
There was no way he could explain something he had to stutter even in Korean in English.
“Why? Do you need a computer?”
Dave, who didn’t even know what YongHo was thinking, asked with shiny eyes.
‘Haa……’
If he couldn’t do anything like this, then it was obvious what kind of situation would occur.
‘I have no choice… I should write this down.’
The method YongHo chose was writing down the codes.

Normally, algorithms are expressed in simple mathematical formulae when explaining. Programmers would code while looking at that.
Sometimes, 2 or 3 lines of mathematical formulae would become several tens of lines easily in actual coding.
YongHo looked for the bug history on his bug window and wrote down the code he used for the NetFlax Prize.
“……”
The people inside the conference room nodded their heads quietly while looking at the whiteboard. The 2m wide whiteboard became full with the code that YongHo wrote down.
Looking at that, Dave shivered.
“What are you doing YongHo, you’re even implementing it here?”
He seemed to think that YongHo wanted to boast that he can complete even the implementation stage and not just the formulae level.
However, YongHo’s situation was different.
‘Just be quiet!’
He wanted to shut Dave’s mouth. When he first met Dave, there was a precondition that YongHo couldn’t speak English. Moreover, Son SeokHo was with them so the questions Dave was interested in were covered to an extent.
However, it wasn’t like that now.
Moreover, after writing the code, he had to confront 10 peak-level developers and not just Dave. YongHo was trying to stall for time. He intended for not even questions to come out.
Soon, cold sweat flowed down his back to the point that his entire back became wet.

Tap.
After writing the whole code, YongHo put the lid on the board marker as he couldn’t stall for time anymore.
It wasn’t just one or two lines of code, so just writing them all down took him 1 hour.
Some engineers were taking photos with their phones.
“YongHo, from next time onwards, please tell us in simple formulae. Code is too long. Or you can use pseudocode(a code that’s not a code, and only used in explanations).”
YongHo, who expended all his energy in while writing, couldn’t reply and replaced it with a nod.
When YongHo sat down exhausted, Dave came up front. Then, he pointed the whiteboard where YongHo wrote the code with his hand.
“Well then, did you see, everyone? In this code, there is a direction that we need to strive for. In the future, our team will focus on upgrading our recommendation system by a level by applying this code to our service.”
Senior Data Engineer.
This was Dave’s position.
Looking at him up front, he was completely different from the him who was playing around all the time.
The word ‘Senior’ in his position told him that it wasn’t luck that he became one.
The conference ended barely after Dave came up front.

YongHo was trapped in one thought after he left the conference room.
‘I need to study.’
Although he also needed to work on his English, YongHo felt the desperate need to study about algorithms.
If someone asked him with a mathematical formula? Root(√), lambda(λ), sigma(Σ), etc – he was just getting used to these symbols.
He wouldn’t have known if he didn’t do the algorithm study in Korea.
‘I can’t ask Dave to teach me.’ (T/N: Why!?)
The level of ‘difficult’ that YongHo thought and Dave thought was different. If he asked Dave, then he might show a ‘you didn’t even know this?’ reaction. (T/N: That’s not a reason.)
Moreover, he wrote a recommendation to the company believing in YongHo’s ability. That belief may collapse instantly. The fact that he had a positive attitude towards YongHo had YongHo being smart to the point that he came first in the NetFlax Prize as the basis. A sense of comradery – in a sense.
YongHo was afraid that such belief would collapse.
‘There’s a limit to studying alone.’
He needed somewhere to ask what he didn’t know. There was no time to wait to upload a question and wait for a reply.
Tomorrow.
He had to go to work.

***

YongHo messaged Jeff Done through SNS that day.

-Greeting, sir Jeff Done. Do you remember the meeting we had in the Koogle Design Award last time? I moved my workplace to Silicon Valley of America. If you have time, I want to talk to you about life here in Silicon Valley and about programming.
Please contact me.
The king of optimization that YongHo knew was NASA but there was no connection between them.
The second was Jeff Done.
Jeff Done.
YongHo didn’t know but he was already a celebrity.

If Jeff Done is the one doing the optimizing, then a result is returned even before running.
If Jeff Done goes on a vacation, then the service stops by itself.
Before the compiler(A program that translates high-level language to machine language) throws a warning, Jeff Done throws a warning at the compiler first.
A unique programmer who implements a web server using one line of code. (T/N: That’s bullshit)

And such stories were on the internet.
‘Will such a person meet a person like me……?’
YongHo, who was thinking negatively for a moment, shook his head.
‘I definitely need to meet him. I came here to learn from a person like this.’
Before he came to America, he felt like the resolve he made when his mind was burning white, was being diluted.
If he didn’t keep engraving it, he forgot it in no time, and abided to reality. If one didn’t live as one thought, then one thought as he lived – this saying was true.

***

Countless people were listed as friends. Bland words were shared through SNS so Jeff Done was flicking the screen quickly with his thumb.
‘Lee YongHo?’
He felt like he heard this a lot from somewhere. He heard countless names every day so if it wasn’t important then he wouldn’t even remember it.
‘Where was it…’
Jeff Done read the article that YongHo left on his rocking chair. There was nothing special about its content.
People who wanted to learn programming or algorithm from him were overflowing.
‘Koogle design award, that’s it.’
It was a competition he participated in to support the startup he was doing now. Koogle was funding the company, so it was difficult to refuse.
With the thought that he may as well do this properly since he was doing it, he submitted one optimized on the first indroid.
The one YongHo submitted was O1. Although it wasn’t the first phone, it was definitely impressive.
‘Hm… Shall I meet him for once?’
He was listening to many people as he was stuck on a problem.
If it was someone at YongHo’s level, he felt that it wouldn’t be bad to talk.