Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon

Trust Networks

Large coordination emerges from small-scale trust.

Heart’s knack for putting together effective engineering teams had made him a highly regarded and valuable project manager. He looked for people who would be committed to a common mission rather than a personal agenda. He preferred to keep teams small so that everyone was always talking to everyone else. Heart chose the kind of people who took personal responsibility for what they did. And while Heart tolerated idiosyncrasy, he shied away from egocentric “head cases,” no matter how smart they were.
Pacemaker Principle

Constraints in one part dictate the whole.

Messages in the sending host’s buffers, waiting for links to clear, were like patrons in a restaurant waiting for tables; RFNMs were the equivalent of the maître d’s announcing “Your table is ready.” This meant it was impossible to send a continuous stream of messages over any single link through the system from one host to another.