EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.

One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.

Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.

Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!

The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.

At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."

"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"

"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".

Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.

As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.

Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?

This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.

I've been in touch by phone with a recruiter from collabera.com and they seem to be in a huge rush to get started with me in a cloud support engineer for Microsoft Azure. They have a screening call setup on Wednesday for me with an Account Manager at Microsoft Azure. With rising recruitment scams among other things, I'd looking to verify they are legitimate before I give them any information beyond the info I already gave. They've told me they need me to start the job ASAP.

They've asked for:

- Legal name

- State and County Name

- Partial date of birth (They were very clear to not include the year of birth)

- Choice of pay option

They've already sent me a pay offer and information on the health insurance plan I would receive.

There is a known phishing scam from collabera.net impersonating collabera.com according to the BBB that they're warning about.

I want to make sure that beyond low balling me for a pay offer (they said it's an 18-month contract) there's not anything else fishy going on.

I have other interviews this week and will likely have an offer from another company directly (not through a staffing agency) in a few weeks. While I want to accept offers that are good, I want to make sure I'm not giving my personal information to scammers.

Based on some research there seem to be a lot of scams using the company's name. I found the article https://theregister.com/2020/07/... at least indicates the company is real. In my call with them they did not insist on me giving them my social security number or other personal information (which they'd need for identity theft) and they also gave me information on the health insurance plan. On the other hand they seemed unprofessional. It's hard to know who to believe. They also sent me information on IIS I'm supposed to read before the screening call. It all seems very weird. I'm skeptical to say the least. It's all very detailed if it's a fake job offer scam.

I don’t want to skip a real interview but feel anxious after reading a lot of bad things about the agency.

Follow-up to my exp with Travis CI: https://devrant.com/rants/5006826

As my allotted credits are set to expire on December 23, I sent a request for 25k monthly OSS credits to Travis support on December 18.
Mind you this is only half of the credits of their lowest subscription price and I didn't ask for extra CPU, so not much to ask.

While for the previous credit request, I got an answer within 24h, this request has gone unanswered for over 2 working days and I noticed it got labeled with "Priority: low" although I will be unable to continue my OSS work in 2 days.

Let's see whether they plan to really uphold their promise that "they will always support open-source"

So I got accepted into a Master’s programme for CS - which is kinda cool but hardly unexpected. Guess I should feel elated about it, but honestly, I don’t know how I feel about it. Really it only adds additional complexity into the next few years of my life: I feel a little gutted that I have to switch over to my plan B regarding the sporting side of my life (there’s no way I can work full-time, study AND train for IM simultaneously - there’s just not enough hours in a day…), but that’s okay. At least I had a plan B knowing I might get accepted to these studies now.

What it really complicates is decisionmaking regarding this: https://devrant.com/rants/5571843/...

At my current workplace, I have officially 2hrs each week + an additional full work day a month to use for studying during work hours (in reality I tend to use more than that because I can, whenever there are no pressing matters need doing), and my gut is saying that’s unlikely to be possible in a consultancy position in a startup. Maybe it is, I don’t know. Need to ask.

In life, very few things are ever straightforward, aren’t they? But hey, at least I get to do my Master’s and I get to do it in a quality university!