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 Documentation for all of the above is largely missing, incorrect, out of date, or incomplete.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.
