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You Can't Buy Integration

martinfowler.com

121–130 of 143 posts

Re: You Can't Buy Integration

#121
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you gave a cgi-bin script as example, assuming you have an Azure Cloud account, you can easily do it via , provided it is written in JavaScript, PowerShell, TypeScript, or C# Script. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-functions/funct... Here is video tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1A7vp3zAB9U Or in the context of low code tools, Azure Logic Apps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/logic-a…

And this is the equivalent for cgi-bin "vi ~/public_html/cgi-bin/hello.sh" And the code itself did not contain 10 lines of vendor specific scaffolding to run either but were straigt onto the business logic. Where is the platform where i can take an completely standardized scriptfile use my preffered ftp/scp client and upload it into an runtime configured to run inside of the corporate firewall?

You are missing having IT set up a UNIX server instance, with Apache or NGINX on it, configure firewall, public IP DNS entry, and then having the rights to ftp/scp into it before being able to call vi into hello.sh.

So if you want that approach then, IT would set an "static HTML web app" instance for "~/public_html" version, which you can then ssh into.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/configure...

or have a VSCode like experience editing directly your site files,

https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/...

Re: You Can't Buy Integration

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point the issues with Java are cultural, but they used to be evolutions of constraints of the rigid "everything must be a class" model. If nothing in the architecture can just be a free-floating procedure, not even a pure function, the system architecture will evolve around this

Kotlin has been a godsend when it comes to breaking free of Java dogmatic thinking. The effort to write good functional code is so much less. That's not to say that classes are useless. I try to limit class usage to data structures that do no more than: - Store data - Simple convenience functions that tell me about its state - Side-effect-free mutations (or data massaging) that have no external dependencies other tha…

Classes manage something stateful.

One anti-pattern/code smell I often see is finding classes in a service which should just be a functionally pure pipeline (eg. no internal state is managed)

Re: You Can't Buy Integration

#123
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding is just if statements, more or less. Programming and coding are different words with different meanings, though. What is the reason to conflate them?

Because 'coding' is just slang for 'programming'.

That is not true, though. Coding is about writing code, whereas programming is the thought process that goes into writing code. The original comment establishes the same distinction, so it is not exactly a novel separation. The question was why then conflate them when they were already recognized as being different?

Re: You Can't Buy Integration

#124
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are quite a few people like us - I have a different background from you, but I do feel like I'm spread a bit thin and haven't really specialized in anything. The good news for us is that I think it's not the end of the world - it's still possible to deep dive into something and specialize in it, so long as you can find the time :)

As another generalist that enjoys occasional (very) deep dives but never gets tied down to one platform/tool/skill/problem set - being a good jack of all trades is it's own special skill, and it is quite rare. Small and medium sized teams really need this sort of person as the mythical "10x" engineer, and in many cases this is a great stepping stone to technical/team leadership, PM roles, and entrepreneurship.

This is a nice glass-half-full way to look at it, which honestly I hadn't considered doing before. I will try to think about things this way a bit more :)

Re: You Can't Buy Integration

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t build a fire in the rain, nor can I skin and prepare an animal. But I can buy a slab of beef and chuck it in a pan. If we’d all be stuck with the very basics, we’d be nowhere. This is why abstraction and specialisation are important.

Thing is, if you needed to make a fire in the rain and skin & prep and animal, you'd have a good chance of at least getting most of the way there as you understand the concepts. The problem here is more equivalent to not even knowing what and animal or fire is , nevermind how to do the tasks at hand.

I would starve. As would most. And if I manage to scavenge some food, I’d die of some triviality within a month because I don’t have medical training.

We’re completely and utterly screwed without antibiotics and electricity and farmers.

And I’m convinced that at every step of our species’ advancement through abstraction and specialisation somebody warned of impending doom.

I don’t see how the same won’t apply to software.

Re: You Can't Buy Integration

#126
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is the equivalent for cgi-bin "vi ~/public_html/cgi-bin/hello.sh" And the code itself did not contain 10 lines of vendor specific scaffolding to run either but were straigt onto the business logic. Where is the platform where i can take an completely standardized scriptfile use my preffered ftp/scp client and upload it into an runtime configured to run inside of the corporate firewall?

You are missing having IT set up a UNIX server instance, with Apache or NGINX on it, configure firewall, public IP DNS entry, and then having the rights to ftp/scp into it before being able to call vi into hello.sh. So if you want that approach then, IT would set an "static HTML web app" instance for "~/public_html" version, which you can then ssh into. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/configure...…

I feel like you must know this, but the convention back in the day was a UNIX server for an organization, that would handle essential tasks like email, that everyone could log in to and have access to common UNIX tools, and that would automatically serve "/home/$USER/public_html" as static HTML web apps under example.com/~$USER.

So, IT sets the server up once and maintains it and provisions and deprovisions accounts, but everything else is self service. There's no need for IT to be involved when somebody wants to "launch a new web page". It was a pretty nice system for what it was.

Re: You Can't Buy Integration

#127
post #15

Really great read. Long but worth it. This is a good critique of low-code/no-code in general. The root problem I see of "Unfortunately, when we frame the problem space that way, we have allowed our tools to think for us." is that in reality there are just not enough qualified software engineers out there.

I’ve hear the way to succeed with SAP is to reorganize your business to match either the default world view or some other cookie cutter variant. Essentially using it no code style. Otherwise you’re exerting yourself doing “normal” things. That’s not sustainable.

Twenty-odd years ago we sat through presentations by Peoplesoft implementation consultants. When I looked through my notes, I found that all of them said, with slight variations in the wording, "you have to do it Peoplesoft's way." I'm sure they were right.

Re: You Can't Buy Integration

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All ERPs are fundamentally like that. At the end of the day you are purchasing a COTS product specifically to gain efficiency of industry best practices already coded for you. If you take a COTS product and then try to rewrite it to fit your "unique" business processes, we'll, that's why half of them fail. Implementation of erp is incorrectly and disastrously viewed as an IT project. It is first and foremost a busine…

This is why my company has custom applications that talk to the ERP for certain departments. Inventory control in the ERP isn’t going to work with reality. The data modeling is good enough but the interface is not. Rather than train everyone we hire to use horrifically bad and expensive barcode readers, we purchased cheap smart phones, put them in cases, and locked them down to run an app that uses the camera to scan…

My wife worked for an association that got bit badly by the one true platform bug. They had an excellent publishing platform, with features that were then incompletely implemented in whatever association-management platform it was. I couldn't imagine why a clean, limited interface to the platform couldn't have been implemented at less cost. She was fortunate to be gone before the change was implemented.

Re: You Can't Buy Integration

#129
I have worked with Mulesoft before. It is a classic case of over-promise and underdeliver. It promises drag and drop functionality to integrate systems using its Mulesoft Composer. While that may work for many situations, often I wound using Anypoint Studio (eclipse shell), struggle with its dataweave data manipulation language, and googling the java error messages it spat out. It is also expensive as all Salesforce products are. With Mulesoft's Cloudhub, we pay for "virtual cores". We schedule Mule package to the tenth of a virtual core and stack their schedules to not exceed our assigned limits. Each virtual core is essentially a virtual machine/java process/network that is independently restartable. My biggest complaint is dataweave. It mixes objects/arrays/literals without aiding the developer in any meaningful way.

https://docs.mulesoft.com/dataweave/2.4/dataweave-cookbook-e...

Re: You Can't Buy Integration

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did computer engineering in school 20 years ago, and have always enjoyed understanding technology. So I know what is happening from the gate in the cpu all the way up to the pixel in the monitor. The downside is that I'm spread pretty thin. I can't pass leetcode exams in the 30 minutes of allotted time, ops people can't understand why I don't use containers, and my knowledge is probably useless in making a modern C…

At some point, you may have to look beyond traditional employment situations to best make use of your technical knowledge and experience. However, it might mean moving to consulting and possibly 'selling' yourself on a more regular/periodic basis. I have soldered chips to boards .... close to 40 years ago, and plugged enough cards/cables together to last a lifetime. (I really don't like hardware stuff!). I've done ba…

There are still places that need and are looking for that sort of help! Especially inside smaller cloud companies (Digital Ocean, Linode, etc) (or any company that's got their own datacenters, eg Facebook) where the solution to a problem can't be to use some AWS service. A heavy hitting sysadmin (embrace calling it devops instead) like yourself is necessary to getting stuff off the ground to a proof of concept stage, then to production.

Grinding leetcode is falling out of fashion anyway for many reasons, (but Leetcode will never tell you that), but it's still a skill to practice up on and be able to make it past an easy question without problem. It's not a skill you'll use normally at work, but the secret is no one's good at leetcode shit out of the door. It takes dedicated practice until you can pass it the interviews, just like any new skill.

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