New Book Review: "No Better Time"
New book review for No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet, by Molly Knight Raskin, Da Capo Press, 2013, reposted here:
The back cover description of this book as "a riveting personal and high-tech story, with a heartbreaking 9/11 coda" could not have been better stated. While this story is not the memoir that Danny Lewin, the individual who pioneered the technology behind Akamai, might have written had he been given the chance to do so if it were not for his arguably being the first victim of 9/11, this book is so well written that much of what the author decided to include, based in large part on interviews with those closest to him who have not shared their memories until now, would probably be in such a work.
This page-turner of a book reminds me of "The Wrong Answer Faster: The Inside Story of Making the Machine that Trades Trillions", by Michael Goodkin, to some extent in the sense that it covers the life of an individual working in the tech space from both personal and professional perspectives. Unlike that book, however, this book gets into much more detail with respect to the specific ideas that led to the business successes of Danny Lewin and Tom Leighton, the MIT Laboratory of Computer Science (LCS) theory head group with whom Lewin collaborated early from an algorithms perspective and later cofounded Akamai.
In Chapter 4 ("May Madness"), named after an MIT competition that garnered the intensity and tension of a professional sports draft, highlights of the breakthrough that Akamai provided are shared from a series of slides. Internet service providers could not give content providers the quality of service that they needed, resulting in the World Wide Wait. The common solution at the time was to design systems for max load in the face of flash crowds, but this was too expensive and unpredictable. One solution that CNN used was to remove all large content in these situations, but this degraded site quality.
In addition to the quality of service problem was distance. Most site visitors were different from a central site, which increased costs and resulted in performance degradation. One solution was to install hosting farms that were located near network access points, but these were still sizable distances from site visitors. Mirroring site content at a few locations was another solution, but very expensive, limited in scale, and like the CNN solution, involved administrative issues. Akamai would enable ISPs to host content at thousands of locations worldwide, making content near users and providing intelligent replication to handle flash crowds and handing over greater control to content providers.
The problem was that the presenter the Akamai team had chosen for the competition was "the business guy" and was not from MIT. As the story enfolds, it became clear that Lewin's involvement in future presentations was the key to the growth of Akamai, since the problems that were involved and the devised algorithms on which the technical solutions depended required more than high level business understanding. Corporate stakeholders with deep technical expertise needed to be convinced that what was being presented provided significant benefit and could actually be implemented.
While the drama behind the initial competition at MIT and frequent visits to the white board throughout this story will undoubtedly satisfy readers with an interest in technology, it is the family background that the author provides in Chapter 2 ("Ascent to Israel") and the camaraderie that begins between Lewin and Leighton in Chapter 3 ("Publish or Perish"), together with coverage of the grueling work hours in the midst of the dot-com bubble and the toll taken on Lewin's marriage to Anne during this time period, later followed by reconciliation in Chapter 10 ("With the Help of Heaven") just before 9/11, that makes this story come alive.