In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.

Well, no need for those notes any longer.

I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".

I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.

We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.

I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.

It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.

Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.

Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.

This is the third part of my ongoing series "The Ballad of the Six Witchers and the Undocumented Java Tool".
In this part, we have the massive Battle of Sparks and Storms.

The first part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The second part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5054467/...

Over the last couple sprints and then some, The Witcher Who Writes and the Butchers of Jarfile had studied the decompiled guts of the Undocumented Java Beast and finally derived (most of) the process by which the data was transformed. They even built a model to replicate the results in small scale.
But when such process was presented to the Priests of Accounting at the Temple of Cash-Flow, chaos ensued.
This cannot be! - cried the priests - You must be wrong!
Wrong, the Witchers were not. In every single test case the Priests of Accounting threw at the Witchers, their model predicted perfectly what would be registered by the Undocumented Java Tool at the very end.
It was not the Witchers. The process was corrupted at its essence.

The Witchers reconvened at their fortress of Sprint. In the dark room of Standup, the leader of their order, wise beyond his years (and there were plenty of those), in a deep and solemn voice, there declared:
"Guys, we must not fuck this up." (actual quote)
For the leader of the witchers had just returned from a war council at the capitol of the province. There, heading a table boarding the Archpriest of Accounting, the Augur of Economics, the Marketing Spymaster and Admiral of the Fleet, was the Ciefoh Seat himself.
They had heard rumors about the Order of the Witchers' battles and operations. They wanted to know more.

It was quiet that night in the flat and cloudy plains of Cluster of Sparks and Storms. The Ciefoh Seat had ordered the thunder to stay silent, so that the forces of whole cluster would be available for the Witchers.
The cluster had solid ground for Hive and Parquet turf, and extended from the Connection River to farther than the horizon.
The Witcher Who Writes, seated high atop his war-elephant, looked at the massive battle formations behind.
The frontline were all war-elephants of Hadoop, their mahouts the Witchers themselves.
For the right flank, the Red Port of Redis had sent their best connectors - currency conversions would happen by the hundreds, instantly and always updated.
The left flank had the first and second army of Coroutine Jugglers, trained by the Witchers. Their swift catapults would be able to move data to and from the JIRA cities. No data point will be left behind.
At the center were thousands of Sparks mounting their RDD warhorses. Organized in formations designed by the Witchers and the Priestesses of Accounting, those armoured and strong units were native to this cloudy landscape. This was their home, and they were ready to defend it.
For the enemy could be seen in the horizon.

There were terabytes of data crossing the Stony Event Bridge. Hundreds of millions of datapoints, eager to flood the memory of every system and devour the processing time of every node on sight.
For the Ciefoh Seat, in his fury about the wrong calculations of the processes of the past, had ruled that the Witchers would not simply reshape the data from now on.
The Witchers were to process the entire historical ledger of transactions. And be done before the end of the month.

The metrics rumbled under the weight of terabytes of data crossing the Event Bridge. With fire in their eyes, the war-elephants in the frontline advanced.
Hundreds of data points would be impaled by their tusks and trampled by their feet, pressed into the parquet and hive grounds. But hundreds more would take their place. There were too many data points for the Hadoop war-elephants alone.
But the dawn will come.
When the night seemed darker, the Witchers heard a thunder, and the skies turned red. The Sparks were on the move.
Riding into the parquet and hive turf, impaling scores of data points with their long SIMD lances and chopping data off with their Scala swords, the Sparks burned through the enemy like fire.
The second line of the sparks would pick data off to be sent by the Coroutine Jugglers to JIRA. That would provoke even more data to cross the Event Bridge, but the third line of Sparks were ready for it - those data would be pierced by the rounds provided by the Red Port of Redis, and sent back to JIRA - for good.

They fought for six days and six nights, taking turns so that the battles would not stop. And then, silence. The day was won, all the data crushed into hive and parquet.

Short-lived was the relief. The Witchers knew that the enemy in combat is but a shadow of the troubles that approach. Politics and greed and grudge are all next in line. Are the Witchers heroes or marauders? The aftermath is to come, and I will keep you posted.

Update: https://devrant.com/rants/5220410/...

I resigned from my second job.

First job tenure: 7.5 years
Second job tenure: 10 months

This job taught me a lot and paid me decent, but not enough to cope up with the bullshit and sacrifice, WLB, and happiness.

I landed a job at one of my dream companies I always wanted to be and possibly the best company in my city. Also the role is B2C in nature and one of only profitable start-ups from India. The domain is second favourite of mine (Music > Art/Events > Travel).

Second job was in travel domain, world's largest OTA but the timezone fucked my happiness and that is what my first job offered me.

I could easily score better offers with higher pay and benefits but I was optimising for a work life balance and team in same time zone along with some impacting work.

I do have some interesting interviews coming up and I am not sure how will I end up performing.

When I got this first offer, this job hunting season, I initially rejected some silly policies. I regretted the decision and thankfully after having a transparent conversation with the recruiter, I accepted it. Funnily, the resignation from second job isn't making me feel emotional, guilty, or any negative emotion. Which evidently signals that the job was toxic and I had to step out asap.

The purpose it served in my journey was bring my remuneration to market levels and teach me a lot more skills in just short span.

Excited to see how the future unrolls. I'll keep my fellows here posted.

I really want to spend more time here talking and hanging out with you all. Hopefully I shall be back soon. Until then keep safe my lovelies :)

Back in https://devrant.com/rants/5492690 @Nihil75 referred to SlickVPN with a link, where you can buy a lifetime licence for $20. I thought - what the hell.. I don't need a public VPN rn, but for $20 for a lifetime lic - I'll take it, in case I'll ever need one.

I had some trouble signing up - the confirmation email never reached my inbox. So I got in touch with support. And they.... generated and send me a password in plain-text.

And there even isn't any nagging requirement to change the pass after I sign in for the first time!

IDK... As for a service claiming to be security-oriented, the first interaction already screams "INSECURE".

Well.. should still be OK for IP switching, to unlock Netflix content I guess. Don't need anything secure for that 🤷

Follow-up on https://devrant.com/rants/5001553/...

How the fuck are Jupyter notebooks so popular in research? Like some dude had an idea to take perfectly good markdown and python code, add a whole lot of transitional properties to make version control impossible, encode it as JSON on the assumption that a human could somehow look at it and make sense of countless escaped characters and base64 encoded data, create dedicated software people need to install in order to read what used to be simple plain text, and think "This. This is what 99% of data researchers will use from now on." And somehow, overwhelming majority of researchers agreed that this extremely inefficient data format is the best there is and they should develop all their tools around it.

Follow up to this:

https://devrant.com/rants/6403741/

So we had today a meeting....

To restart the project, as the current state is garbage.

Turns out the whole team has after two weeks of being left alone with it - kinda like the rant says - zero clue how lucene works, what it does, what its for.

In case anyone of you wonders why some managers are micromanaging biatches, there you have it.

The whole meeting had more "oooh"... "ehm".... "eh"... and other fillwords just to cover the shame of not having any clue at all.

I'm really disappointed that a team of up to 5 people really thought they could pull a stunt of "fake it till you make it". Collectively. Really noone had a real clue.

Now to an interesting discussion: How would you devs reprimand them?

:)

Just curious. Firing is out of option, for several reasons, e.g. law.

Serious answers, I would be really curious. :)

I'm feeling sad for the socks metaphoric in the last rant btw.

Even a cum socket deserves more dignity than them imho.

Update 2: https://devrant.com/rants/5446637/...

Not saying that my boss is wrong, but the way he gives feedback and teach me is just awful. Just today, a new colleague told me that one of the ex-team member quit because of our boss.

Anyway, the activity I was working on, I nailed it.

In morning connect, boss specifically told what he was looking for and made me do a live task and gave feedback. That made me realised what he was looking for.

I spent the day completing the activity. When I showed him, his jaw dropped.

He tried to pick on few things, but failed to do so.

He loved the output. Praised me and my persistence. Finally, the history repeated itself, and I learnt more about communication.

Possibly my weakest point out of all, where I was failing in interviews and had to fix that. Now, I got some pointers and will work on it to excel futher.

Yes, things were stressful, but I came out to be stronger.

So I made a couple slight modifications to the formula in the previous post and got some pretty cool results.
The original post is here:
https://devrant.com/rants/5632235/...

The default transformation from p, to the new product (call it p2) leads to *very* large products (even for products of the first 100 primes).

Take for example
a = 6229, b = 10477, p = a*b = 65261233

While the new product the formula generates, has a factor tree that contains our factor (a), the product is huge.

How huge?
6489397687944607231601420206388875594346703505936926682969449167115933666916914363806993605...
and

So huge I put the whole number in a pastebin here:
https://pastebin.com/1bC5kqGH

Now, that number DOES contain our example factor 6229. I demonstrated that in the prior post.
But first, it's huge, 2972 digits long, and second, many of its factors are huge too.

Right from the get go I had hunch, and did (p2 mod p) and the result was surprisingly small, much closer to the original product. Then just to see what happens I subtracted this result from the original product.

The modification looks like this:

(p-(((abs(((((p)-(9**i)-9)+1))-((((9**i)-(p)-9)-2)))-p+1)-p)%p))
The result is '49856916'
Thats within the ballpark of our original product.

And then I factored it.
1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12, 23, 29, 46, 58, 69, 87, 92, 116, 138, 174, 276, 348, 667, 1334, 2001, 2668, 4002, 6229, 8004, 12458, 18687, 24916, 37374, 74748, 143267, 180641, 286534, 361282, 429801, 541923, 573068, 722564, 859602, 1083846, 1719204, 2167692, 4154743, 8309486, 12464229, 16618972, 24928458, 49856916

Well damn. It's not a-smooth or b-smooth (where 'smoothness' is defined as 'all factors are beneath some number n')
but this is far more approachable than just factoring the original product.

It still requires a value of i equal to
i = floor(a/2)

But the results are actually factorable now if this works for other products.

I rewrote the script and tested on a couple million products and added decimal support, and I'm happy to report it works.
Script is posted here if you want to test it yourself:
https://pastebin.com/RNu1iiQ8

What I'll do next is probably add some basic factorization of trivial primes
(say the first 100), and then figure out the average number of factors in each derived product.

I'm also still working on getting to values of i < a/2, but only having sporadic success.

It also means *very* large numbers (either a subset of them or universally) with *lots* of factors may be reducible to unique products with just two non-trivial factors, but thats a big question mark for now.

@scor if you want to take a look.