Month: February 2021

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this week. My entire work life has been consumed by slowly and painfully picking apart apart a simple task made unnecessarily complex by corporate political nonsense dictating approach, rather than operational requirements. My team has been asked to build a system that allows other entities within the company to stand up internal websites using Kubernetes. Easy enough except they want us to use the company specific fork of the project, which adds layers of complexity while simultaneously removing key features required to do the thing. Ok so we decide that’s not going to work, time to pivot and use AWS, except oh wait they have a fork of that too with similar additional complexity. Still not impossible except instead of using industry standard tools they want us to use a new barely out of beta configuration management tool. Alright fine, it’s actually not so bad once you get the hang of it, but wait! They have a janky fork of that project as well with it’s own weird complexities. Now build an automation pipeline to integrate all of that within the repo, no not with the usual pipeline tools, they’ve got their own home-brewed tool for that too. At this point to get anything to do anything you have to simultaneously authenticate with at least 3 different services using system accounts managed by someone else, restricted by oppressive vpn and hardware and platform identifications.

I’m slightly unique in that I actually enjoy reading documentation and learning new systems, but did I mention none of these are comprehensively documented? Documentation for all of the above is largely missing, incorrect, out of date, or incomplete. My worst nightmare.

It seems like personally, and in talks with my group mates, that the most difficult thing to do isn’t technical details, it’s time management. We’ve all got lives, jobs, and other classes asking for our time. This class in particular is tricky. The assignments don’t have anything to do with completing the project. We’re all capable of figuring out just about anything given the time, the trick is is finding that time.

This week has been jumping through a lot of organizational hoops at work. Disclaimer: The following might be a bit vague because of NDAs. My team was given a task to design and build a particular tool and piece of infrastructure for one of our clients. Working with this particular client comes with a lot of constraints. Constraints consisting of doing things the company’s way, rather than the best way. Most of these constraints come under the guise of being more secure than industry standard. Security is obviously a valid concern but what is the responsibility of the developer and the security engineer? Excessively complex security requirements prevent developers from accomplishing things in a timely manner but the lack of those requirements creates vulnerabilities.

It’s very difficult being required to use a particular piece of software that claims to do a thing, but doesn’t actually do that thing correctly because it’s still in development, when there’s a perfectly good piece of software that does reliably do that thing.

Currently attempting to accomplish the code review assignment and am a little stumped on how to actually complete the task. I can do a code review but recording a video or screen cast is little bit more tricky of a task. I saw the suggestion of using OSU MediaSpace to record and host the screen cast but when adding a new recording, it tries to open ‘Kaltura Capture Desktop Recorder’ which as far as I can tell is only supported on Mac or Windows. I know how to take screenshots on Linux using scrot but have not had to do screen and audio recording. My laptop is dual booted, so perhaps I’ll just restart and use my Windows partition because I don’t feel like searching for and learning a different software at the moment. I also have a Mac that I have to use for work, so maybe I’ll use that. Overall I love Linux but it is frustrating when organizations require use of specific software and then that software fails to support Linux. Oh well, better than having to use Windows or Mac.