If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail!

This was something which my tech lead used to tell me when I was so obsessed with nosql databases a few years back. I would try to find problems to solve that has a use case for nosql databases or even try to convince me(I didn’t realise it back then) that I need to use nosql db for this new idea that I have, without really thinking deep enough whether the data in question is better represented using an sql schema or not.

Now, leading a team of young developers, I come across similar suggestions from few of my team members who just discovered this new and shiny tech and want to use it in production projects.

While I am not against new and shiny, it’s not a good practice to jump right in to it without exploring it deep enough or considering all the shortcomings. The most important question to ask is, whether some of the problems you are trying to solve can be solved with the current stack.

Modifying your stack requires more than just a week’s experience of playing around with the getting started guide and stack overflow replies. This is something which need to be carefully considered after taking inputs from the people who would be supporting it, that include operations, sysadmins and teams that are gonna interface with your stack indirectly.

I am not talking about delaying adoption by waiting for long list of approvals to get some thing that would bring immediate value, but a carefully orchestrated plan for why and how to migrate to a new stack.

Just because one of the tech giants made a move to a new stack and wrote about it in their engineering blog doesn’t mean that you need to make a switch in the same direction. Take a moment to analyse the possible reasons that motivated them to do it, ask yourself if your organisation is struggling with the exact same problems, observe how others facing the same issue are addressing it, and then make an informed decision.
Collect enough data to support your proposal.
Ask yourself again if you are the one holding the hammer.
If the answer is no, forge ahead!

The solution for this one isn't nearly as amusing as the journey.

I was working for one of the largest retailers in NA as an architect. Said retailer had over a thousand big box stores, IT maintenance budget of $200M/year. The kind of place that just reeks of waste and mismanagement at every level.

They had installed a system to distribute training and instructional videos to every store, as well as recorded daily broadcasts to all store employees as a way of reducing management time spend with employees in the morning. This system had cost a cool 400M USD, not including labor and upgrades for round 1. Round 2 was another 100M to add a storage buffer to each store because they'd failed to account for the fact that their internet connections at the store and the outbound pipe from the DC wasn't capable of running the public facing e-commerce and streaming all the video data to every store in realtime. Typical massive enterprise clusterfuck.

Then security gets involved. Each device at stores had a different address on a private megawan. The stores didn't generally phone home, home phoned them as an access control measure; stores calling the DC was verboten. This presented an obvious problem for the video system because it needed to pull updates.

The brilliant Infosys resources had a bright idea to solve this problem:

- Treat each device IP as an access key for that device (avg 15 per store per store).
- Verify the request ip, then issue a redirect with ANOTHER ip unique to that device that the firewall would ingress only to the video subnet
- Do it all with the F5

A few months later, the networking team comes back and announces that after months of work and 10s of people years they can't implement the solution because iRules have a size limit and they would need more than 60,000 lines or 15,000 rules to implement it. Sad trombones all around.

Then, a wild DBA appears, steps up to the plate and says he can solve the problem with the power of ORACLE! Few months later he comes back with some absolutely batshit solution that stored the individual octets of an IPV4, multiple nested queries to the same table to emulate subnet masking through some temp table spanning voodoo. Time to complete: 2-4 minutes per request. He too eventually gives up the fight, sort of, in that backhanded way DBAs tend to do everything. I wish I would have paid more attention to that abortion because the rationale and its mechanics were just staggeringly rube goldberg and should have been documented for posterity.

So I catch wind of this sitting in a CAB meeting. I hear them talking about how there's "no way to solve this problem, it's too complex, we're going to need a lot more databases to handle this." I tune in and gather all it really needs to do, since the ingress firewall is handling the origin IP checks, is convert the request IP to video ingress IP, 302 and call it a day.

While they're all grandstanding and pontificating, I fire up visual studio and:

- write a method that encodes the incoming request IP into a single uint32
- write an http module that keeps an in-memory dictionary of uint32,string for the request, response, converts the request ip and 302s the call with blackhole support
- convert all the mappings in the spreadsheet attached to the meetings into a csv, dump to disk
- write a wpf application to allow for easily managing the IP database in the short term
- deploy the solution one of our stage boxes
- add a TODO to eventually move this to a database

All this took about 5 minutes. I interrupt their conversation to ask them to retarget their test to the port I exposed on the stage box. Then watch them stare in stunned silence as the crow grows cold.

According to a friend who still works there, that code is still running in production on a single node to this day. And still running on the same static file database.

#TheValueOfEngineers

I have a dream, that one day my manager does what getaaron did T_T

Finally finished the screwdriver followup ticket. I think.

I spent almost two full days (14 hours) on a seemingly simple bug on Friday, and then another four hours yesterday. Worse yet: I can’t test this locally due to how Apple notifications work, so I can only debug this on one particular server that lives outside of our VPN — which is ofc in high demand. And the servers are unreliable, often have incorrect configuration, missing data, random 504s, and ssh likes to disconnect. Especially while running setup scripts, hence the above. So it’s difficult to know if things are failing because there’s a bug or the server is just a piece of shit, or just doesn’t like you that day.

But the worst fucking part of all? The bug appeared different on Monday than it did on Friday. Like, significantly different.

On Friday, a particular event killed all notifications for all subsequent events thereafter, even unrelated ones, and nothing would cause them to work again. This had me diving through the bowels of several systems, scouring the application logs, replicating the issue across multiple devices, etc. I verified the exact same behavior several times over, and it made absolutely no sense. I wrote specs to verify the screwdriver code worked as expected, and it always did. But an integration test that used consumer-facing controller actions exhibited the behavior, so it wasn’t in my code.

On Monday while someone else was watching: That particular event killed all notifications but ONLY FOR RELATED EVENTS, AND THEY RESUMED AFTER ANOTHER EVENT. All other events and their notifications worked perfectly.

AKL;SJF;LSF

I think I fixed it — waiting on verification — and if it is indeed fixed, it was because two fucking push event records were treated as unique and silently failing to save, run callbacks, etc.

BUT THIS DOESN’T MATCH WHAT I VERIFIED MULTIPLE TIMES! ASDFJ;AKLSDF

I’m so fucking done with this bs.

I'm a fan of Linux, and have used many distros (arch, ubuntu, debian, fedora, mint, centos, rhl) and many desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, Cinnamon, xfce, Enlightenment) before asking this question.

But every single one of these desktop environments always have felt slow to respond in some cases, where I click something and it doesn't open/close immediately, or i double click something but it fails to open or select something. basically I'm not confident my actions on the GUI will have guaranteed, quick responses within reasonable time. I've never ever had this issue with Microsoft OSes (keeping aside the many badly coded softwares which hang or crash). I'm not talking about specific softwares, this is just general usage of opening settings and using the file manager, window menus.

I'm pretty sure my hardware is not the issue. I've run everything on the same rig. And this has always kept me from fully committing myself to a Linux distro. But I can never be sure about display drivers, as they're not identical. But the issues in Linux has been noted by me for many years. So I doubt it's the drivers either.

Is there anybody who agrees with me and know why Linux is the way it is like that, or is this just me facing this annoyance?

So we thought we did something wrong and caused our AdX revenue to plunge. But after 'fixing' yesterday, we broke it further. Then we realised there were alot of illogical numbers on AdX report. We are suddenly making 1/3 of our ad revenue! I am running out of ideas. Anyone else is facing same issue?

One intern showed me an issue he was facing. "Delete" button was not working in a HTML page he had developed, but edit button is working properly. I checked the code both buttons had same id "edit72-btn". I said to him you need to use unique id in a page.

The thing he said next made a speechless. I was just looking at his face.

He said "edit72-btn and del72-btn are almost same, couple of characters are different. Are they going to work?"

One of our team mates is based out of the US office. We are physically distant, but after our manager's departure, we lost touch because our scope of work was different.

Me and two other team members work closely with each other from India and dude is alone, working out of the US.

Super smart, very polite, and a fun person to work and be with. Even when our interaction was less, I learnt so much from him.

Since, I am facing some challenges, I decide to use it as an excuse to connect with him for a coffee and also seek his guidance because he is senior to me.

Some things he mentioned,

1. Our new line manager asks him to do things on spot with no heads up. He has to drop everything and complete the ask.

2. Often times, poor guy, is asked to join meetings on immediate basis. Even while he is having his lunch.

3. He never got support from our new manager. Infact, based on the conversation, I realised that the manager supports me more.

4. He is facing same, if not more, issues with tech. And he didn't have any guidance on how to handle the issue.

5. A lot of times he is facing process and system problems which he isn't able to solve because the org culture is that of working in Silos. And he doesn't get any support from manager.

6. Tech has clearly pushed him back when he asked for help and other teams never respond to him.

My man was still smiling bright and was looking things from a positive lens that all of this is interesting and adds to the learning experience which will be valued when we decide to move on from this job.

These are the people who inspire me. Smiling in the time of adversity.

Even when he had his own challenges, he was ready to guide me and hear my frustrations. I offered him help and will make sure to stay connected so he doesn't feel left out and alone in the team only because we don't work together in physical space.

One thing I have learned over time is, while I am facing problems, someone out there is facing more and difficult problems then me. I always tend to blow up my problems out of proportion then what they actually are.

I am the dumbest person that I know and mark my words, I'll die because of my empathy. I wish I could help my team mate in any possible way.

Colleague trying to create a Visual Studio project and getting the error message that the file path name is too long. (Raging noises of agony)

Me laughing inside because I was facing the same issue a few days ago.

Now I am using VS on mac. Still a pile of crap but at least no issues with file paths anymore 😔

I was wondering if anybody working for a larger Company in 3rd-Level faces the same personal problems as me?

We got alot of our own developed software and process. Regulary some Keyuser fucks something up by importing something wrong, which skews the master data. Its intended to be managed by the Keyuser.

Fast Forward, my Keyusers are so dumb, that they fuck up the master data import wrongfully. The process behind that then have wrong Data to operate (a numeric value neeeds to be set).

The Enduser then opens a Ticket for problem XYZ. Then the Keyuser forwards us the issue.

We already had that same issue X amount of times and its always the same reply. I made a FAQ, Knowledgebase entry, etc.

Nothing works, 2 weeks pass and a similiar tickets comes in...

Memory Capacity of the User exceeded after 1 Day. FML

Anybody facing the same shit?

Fuck you mesa

I installed arch again due to some other mess up (another rant 😂) and this time I was facing problem with sleep.

The system froze every time I tried to wake it up from suspend state.

This is how I wasted past 2 days:
- Wifi device sleep issue, disabling wifi
- Probably sddm issue, let me try lightdm
- Last time I installed gdm, might try that as well
- Had to remove all the bloatware then I suspected plasma
- Checked system logs and found amdgpu error
- Tried disabling graphics using nomodeset, system failed to boot
- glx IP block hung!, it's the graphics driver
- Checked another arch forum, a guy was having a same problem after upgrade
- Downgraded mesa to 18.3.4-1

Worked like a charm though hibernate is still not working

I cannot upload gifs in a rant on android, it stucked on the first frame, what's the problem? Someone is facing the same issue?

Kodi 17 feels buggy after update on Ubuntu 16.04.2. Anybody facing same issue?

!rant

Ever since the Windows 10 anniversary update. Whenever I resume a video after pausing for a couple minutes on VLC the audio is super loud and distorted. I've been troubleshooting this for a long time and tried multiple driver versions and what not. Anybody else facing the same issue?