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Search - "but that would require effort"
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Spent most of the day debugging issues with a new release. Logging tool was saying we were getting HTTP 400’s and 500’s from the backend. Couldn’t figure it out.
Eventually found the backend sometimes sends down successful responses but with statusCode 500 for no reason what so ever. Got so annoyed ... but said the 400’s must be us so can’t blame them for everything.
Turns out backend also sometimes does the opposite. Sends down errors with HTTP 200’s. A junior app Dev was apparently so annoyed that backend wouldn’t fix it, that he wrote code to parse the response, if it contained an error, re-wrote the statusCode to 400 and then passed the response up to the next layer. He never documented it before he left.
Saving the best part for last. Backend says their code is fine, it must be one of the other layers (load balancers, proxies etc) managed by one of the other teams in the company ... we didn’t contact any of these teams, no no no, that would require effort. No we’ve just blamed them privately and that’s that.
#successfulRelease4 -
Unlimited time is impossible... But I don't wanna ramble.
The one thing that I absolutely miss in my kind of work is something that does exist in dozens of flavors and each existence promises to solve some thing...
It's "bug tracker" / "time management" / "ticket management" / "board" / "kanban" or what ever pervert method you prefer software.
I haven't seen a decent one.
I'd think I'd want to build one - it would be definitely an all time consuming effort, since I would be in dire need of specialists.
The thing with nearly all of the solutions is that they lack ... an associative mindset.
Simply put, what we humans can.
The longer a project exists, the more it's housekeeping (guess that's a better word for it) turns into maintenance nightmare.
I remember quite well the joy of puzzling together eg Jira / Bugzilla / ... complex search formulars trying to find the needle in a planet of hay.
If you're read so far and have had similar experiences, think about how nice it would be if you had a mixture of AI and BI doing exactly that.
BI / Business Intelligence to get meaningful statistics is possible, but without AI it's a lot of work.
The AI would need to do several things...
- Match information (eg version XY was released at XY, so each bugreport after XY belongs to version XY and higher if no version matched)
- Tag and categorize (crashed / faulted / fried / ... - tag crash)
- "do the mundane work": ask nicely if the marching / tagging and so on was right, ask for missing info, require feedback etc.
There's a lot I could write more about that topic. But that's the gist. ;) -
And there I was thinking Maven is going to make life simpler, with this granular dependency management and IDE independence (no extraneous classpath and module management required). But wait, it turns out that to run simple Ant task I need all my dependencies to have *.pom. Every. Fricking. Dependency.
I mean, sure, only if I knew which sub-dependencies they all had, but that seems like heck a lot of work to make external JAR libraries to work with Maven process.
WHY TODAY? Yesterday I had no issue: uploaded few libraries in corporate repository, refreshed index, dependencies downloaded, even had time appending javadoc to one of them and it worked. But today is the day, right? I just run simple task with maven-antrun-plugin (mvn antrun:run@<executionID>), and it starts scanning each dependency for *.pom file. I DON'T WANT THIS. Google, help me. Oh, no direct answers and clues?
Just... fuck you, Maven. With all 2 days effort I could just litter in IDE's classpath, write build.xml in no time, make normal webservice, but that would require me to also litter sources with required libraries. FML!4