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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Had a similar thing at work not long ago.

    A newly deployed version of a component in our system was only partially working, and the failures seemed to be random. It’s a distributed system, so the error could be in many places. After reading the logs for a while I realized that only some messages were coming through (via a message queue) to this component, which made no sense. The old version (on a different server) had been stopped, I had verified it myself days earlier.

    Turns out that the server with the old version had been rebooted in the meantime, therefore the old component had started running again, and was listening to the same message queue! So it was fairly random which one actually received each message in the queue 😂

    Problem solved by stopping the old container again and removing it completely so it wouldn’t start again at the next boot.










  • An additional problem (maybe the biggest problem imho) is Amazon and Netflix et al refusing to give them more than 8 episodes per season. For things with a huge amount of source material (e.g. Wheel of Time) this forces the writers to make big changes in order to try to tell a big story in a too short amount of time. Combine this with inexperienced writers or writers who think they can do a better job than the source material, and you’ve got a recipe for failure, in my opinion.

    The Wheel of Time, for example, had many small moments that were amazing, almost perfect, but overall the show ends up being disappointing when so many other parts fail completely.








  • You can google “women in computing” for more details, or check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing - it’s amazing how much women contributed to this field and how little known that appears to be. (I only learned about it a few years ago myself.)

    But the gist is:

    Early on (i.e. the 1940s and 50s), men thought the prestige and honor was in building the giant machines (which back then could fill a classroom or more). Actually programming them was considered easier, “just like following a recipe”, so women got jobs as “computers” who did this part. To quote that wikipedia article: Designing the hardware was “men’s work” and programming the software was “women’s work.”

    Fast forward to the 1970s and people had started realizing that programming was actually hard, and so it was promoted as a field boys should get educated in, while girls were encouraged to instead become nurses and teachers and such.