Chapter 51
Chapter 51
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Translator: Ace
Chapter: 51
Chapter Title: Beta Launch and Credit Exploit
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Once Yoo Seo-ha finished designing the core algorithm, development proceeded without a hitch.
The Bit Forge club room now had two more whiteboards.
Yeon-woo volunteered as the PM—Project Manager—and Jun-gi and Do-hyun joined the meetings as key stakeholders.
Bit Forge shifted into full exhibition mode.
Arrows, circles, and boldly highlighted keywords piled up steadily on each whiteboard.
[Algorithm Design, Simulation → Seo-ha]
[Concurrency Handling → Jong-uk's Team]
[UI/UX → Na-ri's Team]
[Testing → Do-hyun, Jun-gi Feedback]
Yeon-woo scribbled roles onto the board, signaling the project's kickoff.
"Let's focus on building the skeleton this week. Our goal is to get each feature working properly."
Development rolled along astonishingly smoothly.
In a typical project, clashes between planning and implementation—big and small—would be endless. But not this time.
Seo-ha had already paved every path. Thanks to that, Bit Forge could dive into coding with a crystal-clear image of the app and a solid roadmap in their heads.
"No collisions when three people hit it simultaneously. Checked."
"Notification scheduling successful. One crash in battery saver mode."
Seo-ha had stripped the old app's cluttered UI down to just two buttons.
'Fastest Reservation, Fairest Reservation.'
On the third day of development,
checkmarks began filling the role chart on the whiteboard, one by one.
"Concurrency scenario phase one passed. How's notification stability?"
At that moment, Jong-uk pulled out his earbuds and raised his hand.
"When twenty people hit it, two got 'Reservation Confirmed' at the same time."
The room froze.
How much time would it take to hunt down that bug?
But Seo-ha was there.
He walked silently to the monitor and scanned the logs. The screen flew by at an unbelievable speed. Then, having devoured the logs, Seo-ha pinpointed the cause.
"The server only confirmed one person. But two phones popped success toasts simultaneously. Client-side logic did an optimistic update without waiting for the server response."
Yeon-woo blinked, speechless.
"W-Wait a sec! You just read those logs? We'd need debugging tools for hours to spot that..."
When a bug crops up, developers instinctively try to reproduce it first.
Then they attach debugging tools and inspect. That process takes no small amount of time, of course.
'Just from the logs?'
Theoretically possible. But hard to believe.
Seo-ha looked at Yeon-woo with a puzzled expression, as if asking why that was surprising.
Logically deducing the root cause wasn't anything special to him. Especially not with logs providing hard evidence—unlike starting from scratch like in math.
Seo-ha fixed the code, and the bug vanished instantly.
"Maybe I shouldn't major in comp sci."
Jong-uk muttered blankly to himself.
He'd been outdone by a kid with a week of dev experience. It was so absurd he couldn't even feel humiliated.
"It's fine. No one else is like that."
Jong-uk admitted Na-ri's cocky remark felt oddly comforting this time.
Night deepened, but the club room lights stayed on.
"Hey, log tweaks done!"
"UI revisions applied."
"Running test cases."
Keyboard clacks, whirring fans, occasional bursts of laughter.
'Laughter?'
Yeon-woo leaned back in his chair, pondering.
Development doesn't usually go like this. Normally, chasing one bug leaves everyone exhausted, or they're sniping blame at each other.
But right now?
Smooth sailing. Everything on timeline, right on schedule.
Seo-ha was jotting equations on the whiteboard again.
No one doubted anymore that those simple curves and formulas could tidy up even fatal issues in a flash.
A flicker of self-doubt crossed Yeon-woo's face. But he burst out laughing soon after.
'What was I even doubting? A genius who proved the Four Color Theorem couldn't handle code logic?'
The keyboard symphony in the club room surged with fresh energy.
"Na-ri, does the UI have to be like this?"
Yeon-woo ventured cautiously.
But Na-ri didn't even turn around, just kept mousing.
A yellow duck icon floated on screen.
Simple round vector art, but eye-catching. Its eyes were just two dots—until the cursor hovered, triggering a 'blink' animation that brought it to life.
Click.
Yeon-woo tapped the reservation button. The duck flapped its wings.
And the sound effect.
Quack—.
"Uh... Na-ri, I get it's cute, but this is the student council app."
"I like it. Brand identity."
Yeon-woo clutched his head.
"Can we at least make the sound normal? This feels too casual."
"Nope. Reservation success sound only."
Jun-gi stepped in to mediate.
"I think it's fine. What matters is students liking the app. Make it cute, and they'll use it more."
Vice president Min Do-hyun nodded too.
"I like it as well. No need to make the student council app feel like a government site."
Buoyed by the positivity, Na-ri added one more animation.
Click.
Tap 'Laundry Complete' notification. A yellow duck appears by a giant laundry basket. It pecks up the clothes, waddles on tiny legs, and drops them by the dryer.
"Perfect now."
Na-ri spun her chair and declared proudly to everyone.
All bugs squashed, UI locked in.
Test cases? All green.
Just one item left unchecked on the whiteboard.
[Open Beta Service]
"Alright, time for beta."
The internal alpha was flawless.
By the book, they'd recruit testers for closed beta. But everyone in the room brimmed with confidence.
Fatal bugs gone, tests passed, simulations stable.
Jun-gi grinned.
"Word's already spreading. Everyone's hyped. Let's just launch."
Yeon-woo nodded.
"Backup plan's ready too."
Seo-ha still couldn't quite believe his designed app was about to hit the world.
Yeon-woo moused the final build to the server.
Before hitting deploy, the room went dead silent—not even breathing.
"Seo-ha, you do it. You're the architect."
Yeon-woo pulled his hand back from the button.
"Ooh, handing it to the designer? Chief's a romantic!"
"I'm in!"
"Then I'll do it."
Seo-ha took a breath, grabbed the mouse.
Click—.
Deploy pressed. The status bar at the top slowly filled.
[Deploying build...]
Yeon-woo muttered quietly.
"Using an app like this for dorm laundry reservations. Overkill. Way too good for it."
Everyone but Seo-ha felt the same.
Thanks to the student council's advance notice, downloads spiked instantly.
"Twenty users."
"Seventy."
"Whoa, over a hundred."
Seo-ha calmly monitored the screen and logs.
Traffic dispersing as planned. Every structure humming perfectly. Only then did he exhale in relief.
Students started calling the laundry app "Quack-Quack."
"Ah! Gotta do laundry. Checking Quack-Quack real quick."
"What's your credit score?"
'Quack quack' echoed through the dorms, drawing laughter from passing students.
A week after launch,
Everything seemed perfect—until an unforeseen issue blew up.
Laundry machine utilization started dropping.
The reason was simple.
Machines sat empty, yet one group monopolized prime evening slots.
Seo-ha stared at the numbers, baffled. Assuming rational behavior, this shouldn't happen.
He pulled up the server logs immediately.
[19:00 - 21:00 Reservations Success → A-Dorm 3F Group]
[Massive Cancellations → Same Users Repeatedly]
[Credit +1 Earned]
A clear pattern emerged from the chain of records.
Someone books, cancels, and a group mate snags the slot. Repeat. Yielding during peak time earned credits.
"..."
Seo-ha paused his fingers.
The algorithm was perfect.
Yield: reward. Late: penalty. Rules for fairness.
But some students treated it like a game. Yielding wasn't courtesy—it was credit farming.
Yeon-woo peered over at the screen.
"They're group-farming it. Cancel-stamp for credits, then hoard golden hours."
"I simplified cancellations as yields. Mathematically, no difference."
"Reality's not a farm."
An inexplicable sadness washed over Seo-ha.
His model assumed humans acted rationally under axioms.
But real humans game systems for self-gain.
Tap, tap.
Yeon-woo ruffled his own hair roughly, watching Seo-ha tweak code with a glum face.
"Don't get too down. Way more people follow the system."
Seo-ha nodded, eyes on the screen.
"Yeah. But I learned: leave no room for human greed in the system."
Yeon-woo wished Seo-ha had learned that a bit later.
Dark room, monitor glow faintly lighting Seo-ha's face.
He watched endless binary rain cascading down.
Infinite bit matrices transformed in his mind into numbers and symbols.
Zeros and ones fell on the black screen, clustering and scattering—morphing into coordinates, graphs, functions.
Meaningless digits to others gained structure in his consciousness. Revealing their true form.
Seo-ha smiled faintly at the screen.
"You're back, Ducky."
The torrent of bits roused the dormant Ducky from slumber.