There is a big difference between building a prototype system and a piece of production software. In his classic book The Mythical Man-Month, Fredrick Brooks estimates that it takes nine times the effort to create a complete, reliable system as opposed to an initial program that starts to do the job.

With Meena's graduation, I needed a fresh student to turn our prototype into a production system. I got to know Roger Mailler when he took CSE 214, undergraduate Data Structures, with me in the fall of 1997. Roger was the bored-looking student in the front row – too bright and knowledgeable to get very much from the course, but too disciplined to cut class or hide in the back. Roger finished first out of the 126 students in the course (by a substantial margin) and was untainted by a programming assignment cheating scandal that claimed many of his classmates.

Roger is an interesting fellow whose career path to Stony Brook followed a very non-standard course. His first attempt at college (at the Rochester Institute of Technology) was, to be charitable, unsuccessful. In one year at RIT he amassed a grade point average (GPA) of 0.96, where 4.0 is an A and 1.0 is a D. Any mammal with a pulse ought to be able to do better. Indeed, this is the lowest GPA I've ever seen sustained over a full academic year because students capable of such performance usually manage to get themselves expelled before the year is out.