I might be stupid, are you saying a build would take 9 to 24 months to finish?
Either its the wrong unit (minutes?) or the wrong definition of "build"?
Knowing I was a data engineer, one of the archaeologists asked me to take a look at the cataloging system he’d cobbled together on his own: a shared-drive Access database with a full-featured CRUD interface that the whole office had been using for years.
I was able to clean up one stray bug he had, and confirm his suspicion that one particular action was running slow because it had to touch multiple files by necessity (he’d rolled his own sharding) — but generally speaking, it was a work of art more effective than anything I could’ve ever come up with. Sometimes the “dirty hacks” are the best solutions.
But I have seen the maintenance burden first hand of solving weird Access lock file problems (if I never have to manually find and delete an .LDB file again, that would be great) and silent corruption issues and more. I've seen the workarounds of auto-backups of the shared folder and then auto-restores of those backups when silly things happen like the .MDB file is not the expected file size.
There's a special "joy" in needing to know the many under-the-hood versions of Access files and seeing apps that consume and/or produce more than one version at a time. That's just to maintain existing "apps", trying to migrate that data to modern databases for new apps is its own "joy" as well.
I ended up building an Access app at an enterprise-y company I used to work at because it would have taken years for IT to build it. The app did something super specific and kept needing super specific additional features, and there wasn't anything on the market that met our needs. The Access UI talked to another Access database on a shared network drive. I just found out that it's still being used heavily by several people every day, 17 years later. You pretty much nailed it, Access is hacky, but it works!
Edit: grammar
That's cute.
Unless that was a different project altogether?
Hacky is as hacky does.
It was really fun using filters in Pegasus Mail (no SOAP) to automate mailing lists, PGP key signing with e-mail validation etc.
I've gotten so bored at work lately I've been coding for fun again
After recieving properly formatted email, script was executed to apply git merge between svn branches. In case of merge issues, the email was sent back with feedback. If everything was okay, a proper sign-off blessing by one of the technopriests as late check was applied and merge concluded.
4 years in consulting. I've spent the first WEEKS of a project twiddling my thumbs waiting for a laptop, just to spend more weeks waiting on access to source code, tooling, etc.
My friends on the strategy side could start and finish entire projects in that time.
Not necessarily worse, but the stereotype fits! You are, at least, soon doing tangible things.
In the middle are Mule, Rabbit, Kafka, ZMQ.
At the other end is UDP multicast, and I still use that for VM hosts or where I can trust the switch.
Proofread0592•2mo ago
But it seems like an enormous security hole, even with a codeword "password". The author didn't mention it, but I hope they're using whatever version of their company's E2E email encryption is for these messages.
yabones•2mo ago
Ultimately the problem is that in a lot of big corps, IT is basically unaccountable for setting things up wrong. Their only KPI is tickets closed, not the quality or success rate of their fixes.
thewebguyd•2mo ago
They default to tickets closed, uptime, SLA adherence as KPIs because you can't effectively measure "is it set up correctly?" and because the business absolutely must measure everything, they come up with bullshit KPIs so they can have a pretty dashboard and pretend like they're actually managing.
Glad I'm no longer in huge corps, but still an IT manager. Shadow IT is a direct symptom of IT not providing the right tools or having poor processes. But responsibility still lies higher up in the chain. If we weren't forced to quantify all activity, these issues wouldn't exist.
grvdrm•2mo ago
Seems to geared towards tracking work and increasing accountable behavior.
But then the consultant overseeing it (not me) sent a Claude generated report with some sort of JIRA ticket dump as input. All the tickets closed were in fact not done or not relevant. But they were “closed” in JIRA. Same thing with completed tickets.
Embarrassing work product and embarrassment for the company.
fluidcruft•2mo ago