DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either • Hacker News Board

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#71

Post by Corrado » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 2:40 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #63

fifilura wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be possible for you to take a step back and describe the problem you are infuriated by again?

Sitting on the phone with people who's job it is to know these things for their organisation, having to explain to them that no, they shouldn't send me the private key, not even (especially not even) if they send the passphrase too, and many other problems. There seems to be a dearth of people for the ops jobs that need doing, hence OP's “ops are an almost extinct species”, so the tasks are thrown around and have to…

Tell me about it. I'm in the healthcare industry and hospital systems are way too complex and/or they don't have the proper people to manage them. Getting them to understand SFTP is hard enough, let alone public key encryption. Additionally, their systems are often so old and out of date that they don't support anything newer than SFTP. On top of that the regulations they have to follow are just overwhelming and completely out of date.

Honestly, I kinda feel sorry for the poor DevOps people in hospitals. It's got to be torture.

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#72

Post by fifilura » Mon, Jul 08, 2024, 3:07 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #63

fifilura wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be possible for you to take a step back and describe the problem you are infuriated by again?

Sitting on the phone with people who's job it is to know these things for their organisation, having to explain to them that no, they shouldn't send me the private key, not even (especially not even) if they send the passphrase too, and many other problems. There seems to be a dearth of people for the ops jobs that need doing, hence OP's “ops are an almost extinct species”, so the tasks are thrown around and have to…

Thank you for taking the time to reply. FWIW my comment was added a few minutes before your edits so it only contained the [1] footnote and possibly other edits.

I guess I was missing the "why" where your post focused on the "what".

Of course when you are working with sensitive data like that it makes a lot of sense to be really careful about security.

I am well aware about the problems with the csv format. But a lot of times you can not really expect clients to be able to download and decode a parquet file, when all they want is to submit a password, download the data and look at it in excel.

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#73

Post by dspillett » Tue, Jul 09, 2024, 9:44 AM UTC

fifilura wrote: post #72

dspillett wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sitting on the phone with people who's job it is to know these things for their organisation, having to explain to them that no, they shouldn't send me the private key, not even (especially not even) if they send the passphrase too, and many other problems. There seems to be a dearth of people for the ops jobs that need doing, hence OP's “ops are an almost extinct species”, so the tasks are thrown around and have to…

Thank you for taking the time to reply. FWIW my comment was added a few minutes before your edits so it only contained the [1] footnote and possibly other edits. I guess I was missing the "why" where your post focused on the "what". Of course when you are working with sensitive data like that it makes a lot of sense to be really careful about security. I am well aware about the problems with the csv format. But a lot…

> download the data and look at it in excel

Oh, that is a whole extra rant! As much as I actually like Excel as a tool for numerous tasks, it gets things annoyingly wrong too.

We've had clients who manually merge or otherwise tinker with data in Excel to feed to us¹ which can cause numerous problems if leading zeros get cut off identifiers that aren't actually numbers but get interpreted as such, and the age-old joke about Excel being a bit of an inv-cel that mistakes things for dates is still very relevant.

Also it requires (as do a number of MS tools) UTF8 files to have the initial BOM, which is actually not recommended as per the relevant standards², or it will assume Win1252 with all the text corruption that implies if your data contains accented characters, currency symbols, or anything else not in the 7-bit ASCII character set. Sometimes we see data where this has happened at some point to some of it, but not all, so the file has a mix of current UTF8 and corrupted UTF8 then encoded as UTF8. Funfunfun.

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[1] in one case because their requirements changed, and they didn't want to pay anyone (us, the company responsible for the system the data was output from, or their own internal IT/processing/other teams) to automate the new data manipulation…

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark#cite_note-5:~:...

Re: DevOps Isn't Dead, but It's Not in Great Health Either

#74

Post by fifilura » Tue, Jul 09, 2024, 12:42 PM UTC

dspillett wrote: post #73

fifilura wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for taking the time to reply. FWIW my comment was added a few minutes before your edits so it only contained the [1] footnote and possibly other edits. I guess I was missing the "why" where your post focused on the "what". Of course when you are working with sensitive data like that it makes a lot of sense to be really careful about security. I am well aware about the problems with the csv format. But a lot…

> download the data and look at it in excel Oh, that is a whole extra rant! As much as I actually like Excel as a tool for numerous tasks, it gets things annoyingly wrong too. We've had clients who manually merge or otherwise tinker with data in Excel to feed to us¹ which can cause numerous problems if leading zeros get cut off identifiers that aren't actually numbers but get interpreted as such, and the age-old joke…

Yeah. I rarely work with Excel. When we moved to google sheets, most of the problems you listed mysteriously disappeared :)