Alexander Mikhailian

After 25 years of my career I came to understand that one particular type of programmers is the source of many problems in our industry. Here is the story of a project that was nearly destroyed by two such programmers. One of them was leading frontend development, the other – backend. While the rest of the team was slacking off because business requirements were in the works, these two chaps were working hard.

The frontend lead bootstrapped an Angular mono-repository with NX, Rx and other trendy technologies of the moment. The corporate environment did not lend itself easily to NX, but he pushed hard to solve or circumvent infrastructure problems by working with the domain expert. He set up a workflow that, while having Angular as the base framework, bore little resemblance to the official Angular tutorials.

The backend lead was no less motivated to bootstrap the Spring Boot project according to the corporate guidelines while adding a bit of a personal touch in the form of the Vavr library and a highly sophisticated hierarchy of JPA entities with multiple levels of inheritance, discriminators and generators. He then sprinkled it over with a hierarchy of validators based on both Spring Bean Validation and a third-party validation framework and polished with a trendy testing framework.

The rest of the team observed them in admiration.

I was once hired for a core team job. Between my hire and the first day, the core team manager resigned and I was reassigned, so I did not have much chance to work with him.

Instead, I landed in a middle of a drama. The previous core team manager was a servant leader, delivering bare minimum and helping on administrative and organizational matters. He was the loosing party, preparing to quit and passing affairs. By virtue of being hired by this guy, I was considered his protégé by the new core team manager.

That new manager was operating by decrees, and his first decrees were naturally targeted at everyone who could have undermined his authority, including me. Instead of helping he was setting standards and mandating bills of materials. Older product teams mostly ignored him, but new ones were suffering. By the time I left, the guy had a promotion.

Lesson learnt? Core teams win by imposing, not helping.

There is a tendency to strip docker images from wget and curl. Luckily, perl is still available. If you have trouble configuring spring boot healthcheck, think of perl and its IO::Socket module shipped with perl core:

FROM openjdk:11-jre-slim
HEALTHCHECK --start-period=10s --timeout=3s --retries=5 \
 CMD perl -e "use IO::Socket; $sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(Proto => 'tcp', PeerAddr => 'localhost', PeerPort => '8888') or die $@; $sock->autoflush(1); print $sock 'GET /actuator/health HTTP/1.1' . chr(0x0a) . chr(0x0d) . 'Host: localhost:8888' . chr(0x0a) . chr(0x0d) . 'Connection: close' . chr(0x0a) . chr(0x0d) . chr(0x0a) . chr(0x0d); while (my $line = $sock->getline ) { if ($line =~ /UP/) {exit;} }; close $sock; exit 1;"

fdtput -t s /boot/dtbs/rockchip/rk3328-rock64.dtb /analog-sound status okay
reboot

There is a French expression au jour d'aujourd'hui which means "as of today", however, aujourd'hui itself means "the day of today", because hui is the Old French word for "today" and aujourd' is obviously the concatenated form of "au jour de".

But it does not end there: the Old French word hui evolved from "hoc die", which means "this day" in Latin.

At the end, the best explanation of au jour d'aujourd'hui is

(as-of
   (the-day-of 
     (this (day)))

which is fascinating.