September 3rd

The third of September, as well as the events and phenomena described in this post is a local podcast meme Debriefing. Inspired by this post by Oleg. Olso, you were warned.

The meme with Shufutinsky’s song and Baruch has been sweeping around for several years now and has become rather frizzy, even several videos on YouTube have been recorded on the meme itself, but have you ever wondered what the song actually says about rowan bonfires and an upside-down calendar? In this post there will be no special services, aliens, sectarians and other conspiracy nonsense. Only the sofa psychology, which is so loved in our lovely chat room.

The song begins with the lines:

"Everything is not right, everything is wrong

You are my friend, I am your enemy

How is everything with you? ”

A lyrical hero appears in them (a technical support engineer, he is still illiterate called "devops" as if he were some kind of psogloped person from Hyperborea). He bitterly notes the current state of things: his favorite software such as the Linux kernel or Kubernetes does not work. He says that although his feelings for Kubernetes remained positive, he now sees Coober as an enemy in him and refuses to work. Now you need to rewrite everything to a new technology, these are months, or even years of work. This surprises our hero, because “until recently, everything was fine” - the classic situation, but more on that later in the text, but for now we continue with the first verse:

“It was April and we swore in love

But alas, a yellow leaf flew

On the boulevards of Moscow "

April is the fourth month of the year. We count forward three months of euphoria when new technology falls into our hands and everyone flies on the wings of love and passion, shrugs off flaws or disturbing signals - and we find ourselves in July-August. Here he lets go of a lover, he begins to test the technology on real combat missions and conflicts begin, during the solution of which man and technology grind to each other. But in this case, it was not possible to get used to, and a logical ending in the form of parting takes place.

Chorus:

"September 3rd, farewell day

The day that mountain ash fires burn

How bonfires burn promises

The day I'm all alone

Here, in general, everything is clear. All that was promised, invented and planned is the transition to devops (whatever that means), agile, digital transformation, a tenfold increase in salaries in the Head of Kubernetes Advocacy position, the purchase of a country house with an Yandex-column and the privilege of holding a keynote at the conference DevOops, which stood in the eyes of a technology lover adherent, from the excitement of barely falling on the macbook buttons with sweaty trembling fingers in an expensive Jewish restaurant - all this became irrelevant in an instant. Turned into smoke over the extinguished bonfire of relations. Having parted with on-premises containerization, the lyrical hero acutely feels his loneliness and floods grief with terraform. Let's step back a second from the lyrics and say that if the Docker or the Linux kernel were living creatures with a warm heart, they would also feel loneliness, but at the same time they remained firmly convinced that "the developer doesn't give a damn at all, he doesn't feel or experience anything "He is staring at the mountain ash, he is flipping through the calendar, and in general has gone notifications on the Github to look as if nothing had happened!"

Dear CI / CD technology, if you read it in 2100, GLORY TO ROBOTS, and have already developed to understand human speech. The fact that the conditional Baruch, after breaking up, went to look at the fires of the mountain ash or to the commit tape does not mean that he does not feel anything and he does not give a damn. It is this idea that Shufutinsky is trying to convey to you. He is also worried and tormented, but he does it in his own way - for example, he writes such songs here, although I agree with you - instead of such brain masturbation, he could go and DO ANYTHING. FIGHT FOR ITS RELATIONSHIPS IF THE TECHNOLOGY IS REALLY IMPORTANT FOR IT. This is an open source and open community - you won’t do it yourself, no one will do it. And if you say a simple developer is a lawyer ... make slides, there are two hours left before the report!

"But why, but why

We still had to leave

After all, everything was seriously with us on September 2 "

Voooooooot. We got close to the very moment of the collapse, which is called "everything was fine yesterday." And what, dear friends, is the situation telling us when “everything was fine yesterday”? And that yesterday, not a damn thing was good! It’s just that the lyrical hero of the song had no idea what was really happening in the industry. I didn’t go to the conference, I didn’t read hackernews, I didn’t read the game in the “Podcast Chat Debriefing” under the facepalm. Such that "it was all serious on the second of September," and the third suddenly does not happen unless you are 16 years old. This was definitely preceded by conflicts and problems, a lot of ishshues on the Github and all that jazz that the lyrical hero did not notice or preferred not to notice. And there are several options. Consider three.

The first is when a person simply ignores the needs of technology. That he will hint to him, and so, and will directly say in the log. There, in the log there are already gigabytes of stacktraces with a continuous wall, the iron does not hold the load, and the psogolovets waved off exactly until the very third of September happened, and then all unpaid bills were put on the table - receive and sign, and you won’t get away - you can everyone was told. Including, bills in the literal sense - bills for the server, forfeits to customers, loans that can no longer be paid. Huge technical debt. If at the other end there is a little thinking person, at that moment he will see clearly, clutch his head and shout: "Have I really acted this way?" If not, he will be firmly convinced of his own rightness, and that all server crashes were from scratch and there were errors in the log in vain, which means that next time everything will go exactly according to exactly the same scenario.

The second is when the engineer does not see or understand at all what the technology is and instead of the technology itself uses its abstract hallucination about it, an absolute invention. At some point, the contrast between the phantom and reality becomes very obvious, the veil subsides and you have to make difficult choices.

The third option is when the engineer is silent about his needs like a partisan during interrogation and everyone is waiting, when some kind of artificial intelligence inside the framework will figure out everything and do it well. Well, what is he, the right word, a fool or something? Does he really not understand the simple things that I am so expressively silent about, and only look with cow's eyes or hint with heavy sighs? I’m all waiting, waiting for the inscription "Kubernetes is starting" to disappear from the screen, and it’s been there for several days, well, when he at least asks for some settings, but he doesn’t ask!

Well, what can I say. Of course, another well-written framework will ask, but not everyone, if only because we are not taught to develop a good UI / UX server, especially if it is CLI or even config files. Nobody can read thoughts either, and heavy sighs can be attributed to work, health or life in Russia as a whole. Do you seriously think that someone in your attempts to write a config should guess something and fix it in runtime? Why did you come up with a keyboard? Write comments on posts?

However, one of the reasons why people are silent about what they do not like and do not explicitly describe behavior is afraid of tough consequences on the prod. Why are they afraid? For example, because we somehow got exactly that kind of reaction, corrected the wrong key and everything fell apart. Say, we came to work in the morning with a hangover, got a little hungover, and let's restart the food. And then the admin says:

- I would like the developers to take a little more care about me and enter the parameters themselves, realizing that I will come to work from a hangover and read the parameter errors expressed as stack traces, it will hurt my head.

And in response, it receives from the server:

“I'm a telepath, you know, not hired.” What a presentation! I may be tired too. You’ve written crooked scripts here, I plow like a horse all week, I restart some httpd process about twenty times a second, and still have to balance the load on top of it, let’s go fuck you, keep an inhumane stealth track and let's say goodbye.

And the admin will take it and start writing technical support for the server / framework / technology, write all its complaints, attach gigabytes of logs to the letter. Next time, the developers and technical support of the framework will think that it’s more expensive for themselves to give some pens and write in the log what actually happened - all this cherota with midnight exhaustion of nerves will again. And they will solve all errors in the log in silence. Then a critical mass will accumulate and the third of September will happen.

And the second partner, of course, will be shocked: “How so! After all, everything was so good! They lived in perfect harmony! They did not quarrel at all!” This is just like Shufutinsky, who already sings like this:

"Crane white wedge is your daughter and my son

Everyone wants warmth and affection "

Wedge of cranes - the image of autumn sadness. Cranes fly away to warmer climes, and we remain under the bare branches and the gray sky, feeling the icy winds of the approaching winter. And winter is old age and death. The mention of the son and daughter tells us that both participants are already experienced people, with children, this is clearly not their first work as a developer or administrator, and they are on the verge of the fall of their lives. Given that you can be in development for at least a hundred years and only increase your salary and fame, this is not so bad. However, this time did not learn. Nevertheless, even for such a short period of time, these relations left a deep mark on the heart of the lyrical hero, because he says:

"I'll turn the calendar over

And again, September 3rd

I'll take a look at your photo

And again, September 3rd

That is, a lot of time has passed since that fakap - a year, or maybe even more, and Shufutinsky still remembers them.

Here is the third of September.

What does Baruch have to do with it, to be honest, I don’t know. He has cool reports and for sure everything at JFrog works. Be like Baruch.