Love in the Time of MapReduce

This piece was written for an internal Google fiction contest, for the 100th edition of the engineering newsletter. The call to arms arrived in my inbox like so:

For this special Eng Newsletter issue, we’re running a “google eng-y” short fiction contest. You can write about anything, but the story must begin with these two words: “The MapReduce”.

NodeJS is easy, just ask her out

NodeJS is the hot new girl on the block. You’ve flirted a few times at meetups, and you think you could probably get a date with her if you asked. However, you still have doubts. She’s smart, but sometimes it feels like her Inception-esque nested callback conversation is out of your league. Maybe you’d be better off getting back together with Rails. You find yourself missing her concise, imperative style during tedious stretches of smalltalk on dates with other programming languages. She was nice, and she loved you.