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“Listed by market cap?” I asked.
“More or less, although I’ve bookmarked a few others I think are promising.” As if he could read my thoughts, he added, “I can handle the ArgoCoin integration, if it’s too… you know.”
I put on a challenging smile. “No, it’s fine. It won’t kill me. Besides, who better to integrate it, right?”
“That was indeed my thought process.”
I skimmed the list of expansion projects. “Are we building on top of the existing blockchains, or are we running side-chains within the exchange?”
He gave me an appraising look, and I could tell I had impressed him. My chest swelled with pride.
“Side-chains,” he replied. “They give us more flexibility. It also allows us to handle more traffic in case the transaction rate skyrockets on any crypto.”
“You can also trade with a higher spread, too,” I pointed out.
Jude shrugged playfully. “We do intend to make a small bit of profit on the price spread, yes.”
I gasped. “A company trying to make profit? Why, I’ve never!” When he stopped laughing, I added, “Side-chains are a lot more work than building on existing blockchain infrastructure.”
“It is,” he agreed. “Which is why we’re hiring. Owen wasn’t joking about the stack of applications we have. I’m going to want your opinion on some of those hires, by the way. But that’s a problem for next week.”
I nodded. “Do you have a roadmap for the expansion that you want me to follow?”
Jude leaned back in his chair and smiled at me. “I did, but that was before I hired you. Consider yourself off leash. You’ve got free reign to tackle it however you want.”
I smiled back at him and said, “Then I’d better get to work.” I rose, then hesitated a moment. “Jude?”
He tilted his head up at me. “Yeah?”
“I know I have a big mouth,” I said. Every word was excruciating, but I made myself say them. “I can be abrasive too, like Owen. But I’m going to try really hard at this job. To succeed at it.”
“Great to have you on the team,” he said as I left, and unlike Owen, there was no mockery to his tone.
I stepped into my office.Myoffice. It was more formal and impersonal than my setup at home, but it wasmine. It could have been a stool inside of a coat closet and it would have made me smile.
As it was, this was orders of magnitude nicer than a coat closet. My window faced north, the view filled with tall skyscrapers stretching toward a beautiful blue sky, with the bay barely visible between them. The office itself was half the size of either of the corner offices, but that still made it big enough for a desk, office chair, two visitor chairs, and another little meeting table in the corner. There was enough room leftover that I could have put a pool table in here if I wanted. Briefly, I wondered if moving the pool table out of the break room and up here would piss Owen off.
Three computer monitors were positioned on the desk: the middle one was horizontal, flanked on either side by monitors that were rotated into the vertical position. Good for viewing long pages of code. Melinda had placed a sticky note on my keyboard with the login information and a temporary password. I logged in and reset my password to something more secure.
The monitors were hooked up to a beefy laptop attached to a docking station. A quick scan of the local network revealed an enterprise workstation in the corner of the room that I could remote-connect to when I needed more juice. And it had plenty of it: the workstation possessed enough computing power to run a freaking cruise ship.
I opened up the email client. I had a welcome email from Melinda. Moments later, another email came in from Jude, giving me a list of file directories and code repositories that we used. One for DEV (development), and one for PROD (production).
I replied to the email to thank him, and that’s when I saw my email signature.
AMBER MOLTISANTI
SENIOR ENGINEER
I paused to smile at the signature before sending the email. After several long years of trying to go my own way, I had finally found a kick-ass start-up company to work for. It was absolutely my dream job, even if one of the owners was a douche-nozzle like Owen.
Owen. A new, different smile spread across my face.
I opened AT0M, the coding program. There was a tremendous amount of work to do, and I couldn’t wait to get started.
But first, there was something else I needed to take care of.
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