Year: 2016

WTF : The Inner JSON Effect

I’ve seen my share of horrible systems, but I haven’t seen anything this bad:

“So you have ‘customers.json’ and ‘customers.js’. The JSON file is the metadata and the JS file has all the code. So the list of functions in the JSON file tells JDSL to look up those revisions of the JS file to find what functions are available. In this case the actual code is in revisions 568, 899, 900, 901, and so on.”

Although I’ve seen a system before that breaks when adding code comments to certain files (as it was parsing source code with regular expressions, rather then with the language parser):

“Well, yes. I added a few code comments, trying to–”

“You can’t use comments in JDSL!” Tom shouted. “THAT’S WHAT BROKE IT!!”

Jake stayed silent, trying to process how code comments could wipe out a customer database. Tom continued after a pause. “I haven’t added comment support to JDSL, so the runtime executes comments like normal code! You must have had database updates in some comments?!”

“Well, yeah, I put a couple short syntax examples in a comment to clarify–”

Tom burst to his feet. “I knew it! You BROKE IT!” He turned to face the VPs. “I can’t deal with coders who don’t understand the system! You will either fire Jake…or I quit!” And he stormed out of the room.

21st century is finally here with PrimeTel Fibernet

The apartment building where I live in for the last few years had some cabling issues.  That prevented me from joining the rest of the world in the 21st century, when it comes to home Internet connectivity.  Here’s what I’ve been on until today:

PrimeTel (before)

Today, I’ve got my connection updated.  PrimeTel Fibernet, which is currently only available to select buildings, brought the modern age of technology into my house.  Here’s how it looks:

PrimeTel (after)

Yup, that’s a 50 Mbps download with 8 Mbps upload connection.  Nearly a 10x speed increase, but not only that.  Have a look at 1 ms ping now vs. 35 ms ping before.  And that all is for the same price.  And nothing else had to change – I still have the same TV channels and the same landline number.  Ah, no, wait, my home IP address changed, but who cares about that, right?

This thing is so far indeed, that to fully utilize it I need to use the Ethernet cable.  Gladly, that’s how both my PlayStation 3 and the home media server are connected.  With my laptop’s WiFi, I get the numbers like this:

PrimeTel (WiFi)

I’m not yet sure why, but I’ll probably need to look into my wireless card drivers or something.

Anyways, WiFi or not, it’s way faster than it used to be, both in bandwidth and latency.  Which are amazing news!

P.S.: Thanks to SpeedTest.net for cool graphics and years in service too.

Serverlessconf 2016 – New York City: a personal report

Serverlessconf 2016 – New York City: a personal report – is a fascinating read.  Let me get you hooked:

This event left me with the impression (or the confirmation) that there are two paces and speeds at which people are moving.

There is the so called “legacy” pace. This is often characterized by the notion of VMs and virtualization. This market is typically on-prem, owned by VMware and where the majority of workloads (as of today) are running. Very steady.

The second “industry block” is the “new stuff” and this is a truly moving target. #Serverless is yet another model that we are seeing emerging in the last few years. We have moved from Cloud (i.e. IaaS) to opinionated PaaS, to un-opinionated PaaS, to DIY Containers, to CaaS (Containers as a Service) to now #Serverless. There is no way this is going to be the end of it as it’s a frenetic moving target and in every iteration more and more people will be left behind.

This time around was all about the DevOps people being “industry dinosaurs”. So if you are a DevOps persona, know you are legacy already.

Sometimes I feel like I am leaving on a different planet.  All these people are so close, yet so far away …