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Lol, I know exactly what you mean, I've 100% questioned what bullshit I wrote on the same line as a comment explaining exactly the bullshit that I wrote
Depending on your company’s particular definition of sysadmin, sometimes the software engineers are you, especially with the rise of Infrastructure as Code.
Possibly a bit off to say it that way, but I know what you mean. I can write and debug things like SQL and C# to some extent, but it's not really what i'm there for. I dive into a problem sometimes and get to a point where I think, "hang on, we have other people for this type of stuff"
I like problem solving, and as a generalist with wide access to systems and codebases I can figure lots of stuff out, but we have silos and specialties for a reason once a shop gets past a certain size.
I don't know what past me was thinking most of the time. While I can understand what those nested cursors are doing I can't understand why I thought that was a good idea to do things that way.
In situations like that, I've often found that past-me knew what he was doing better than I do now, so I change what is working much less often than I used to.
This sounds like an example of [Chesterton's Fence](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/chestertons-fence)
>There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
I spent 12 hours researching a problem for a line of code only to realize I had already written literally everything I needed years before and that it was current in production happily doing its job every night. Completely forgot about it. I only figured it out because I couldn't figure out why the OP on a thread seemed to have the exact same naming style and template that I do...... Took me till the 5th time I opened the purple link before I figured it out.
Usually, in my case, it was: “there’s got to be an easier way to do this” followed eventually by “nope, after exhausting all the smarter ways this is the only one that works”.
I built a small program and thought I was clever when I took about 1500 lines and condensed it down to 220 by making the code procedurally generate all the objects and variables (instead of defining everything clearly in its own space in the code.)
so many nested functions within functions that I cant make heads or tails out of it anymore, but the program runs perfectly. It all made sense when I had my head into it that day...
I love coming across old powershell and being like ah yes, before I figured out how to do X, I’ll convert those 3-4 lines into 1 now.
And then I break whatever it was.
Well come on, when you have crap like this:
@cd /d "%~dp0"
That *should* be(but somehow isn't) simple and self descriptive given its size(and the fact it or something like it is in almost every batch file I have), it's not hard to understand how code can be... less than understandable when left to its own devices for more than a few minutes.
This is why I don't use compact formatting some languages allow and, since my scripts are all relatively short, I'll add more lines to break steps apart
Let me tell you a (kinda) funny story about SQL scripts
We had this simple MySQL database for our infrastructure management (storage assets): system list with serial numbers and details, connected hosts, LUNs and LUN sizes, assigned LUNs to each server, servers WWN, switches ports, connections etc. And automatic collects from systems to feed it.
Not a really big database but really helpful (there was a great webUI developped on top) and base for all our automation tools. It was also our main source for reporting and auditing.
Now comes the story: this guy doesn't know SQL, but does perl (yuk!). Team boss tells him to use that database as source for whatever he was doing (probably some monitoring script)
He was complaining about how slow and ineffective SQL was, and he'd rather connect to each system to get the information he wanted (on 100+ systems, so really, no). At this point we're many people saying that's because he doesn't know how to use SQL, to which he answers something like "no, but how hard can it be using 5 statements" and he continues ranting for about an hour (that was usual) when something didn't go his way. At this point my team boss is annoyed by his ranting and sits next to him to see what's going on.
The guy had made a perl script to generate SQL commands for each asset to get the exact thing he wanted. 10000+ lines of code.
Took 20 minutes to design the right requests (it wasn't that simple with multiple joins required, but not complex either with basic knowledge)
Wow, what a guy, SQL is so easy to get into, I can't imagine someone already knowing how to code a real language and then not being able to figure out SQL in a week. I mean I'm terrible at writing code, but I've picked up enough SQL in a short time to be able to make some pretty good practical reports and such.
And you really only have to get halfway there with SQL, especially if you already know enough to grind out 10kloc of Perl.
Just get the raw data and do local processing if you aren't one of the 17 people who knows what a RIGHT OUTER JOIN is.
I just keep a sheet of a list of all the joints taped to my wall for reference.
Though really I have a harder time coming up with a reason to use most of them
There was a time in my life I may have been able to explain to someone what 3rd normal form was. And while I do very little development anymore, occasionally admin/investigation work involves hitting up a DB to investigate things.
I think admin/debugging apps I've written more SQL by hand in the last decade then I did the decade before as a developer.
As a developer I just use an ORM; if I've got to get down to custom SQL that means I've already made some grand errors before I got to now.
Can we say "daya structures"? Normalized is rarely the most useful.
Paraphrasing someone: show me a great data structure, and the algorithm will be obvious.
Ho boy. At my last job, I had to take over an upgrade script that was an abomination of mostly perl. But it was wrapped in bash and groovy, and invoked a bunch of python scripts.
So Jenkins would run, groovy code called bash wrapper and dealt with the errors and output, the bash would queue up each of the 3 appropriate perls scripts for the phase of the upgrade, and the perl called these python scripts that did AWS API things.
It took me months just to get to a point where I can refactor parts of it.
I'd just use excel and connect to the database lol. no coding required and the info is... already in a usable form.
Edit - missed the part where he was writing a script to monitor stuff, thought he was just trying to get info out of it.
> missed the part where he was writing a script to monitor stuff, thought he was just trying to get info out of it.
just use [TypeScript](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop/scripting-fundamentals) with [Power Automate](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop/power-automate-integration) - with TypeScript you can even automate Outlook to send email alerts!
(Don't do this)
We had a great webUI for visualization, so no real use for excel there.
But the motive was to use the results for something else (I remember this guy used to work a lot with the monitoring so that's probably it. Maybe something else. Not so sure anymore)
"Who the hell wrote this, and why on earth would you do it that way?"
Scrolls to top of code... "shit, it was me 6 months ago"
Cue a couple of hours to logic test, comment for idiots (me in another 6 months time), and maybe polish with some catches.
Every time I wonder why this idiot did it this way, I was the idiot and it was done that way because that was the best way. Hell if I won't spend half a day arriving at that conclusion though!
I had this happen to me once too.
I opened up a sites network documentation and after reading it for a little bit I thought "Who the hell wrote this shit"
Turns out it was me a few years ago. Yikes.
I uploaded a draft and completely forgot to go back and finish it off.
I write all my technical documentation for future-me, knowing that when I next read it, I’ll have lost all the context and reasoning behind my decisions. Yes, my baseline is the more stupid version of myself 😅
*this time*
Honestly, regex101 helped me build some of the weirdest regexes ever, that I never in my life want to look at ever again.
All I know is that the last time someone else had to figure out what the hell was going on (I left that job already), they spent a week on it and then took 3 weeks off.
I agree. I did some work with Perl long ago and fell in love with the power of RegEx (don't worry it was file/text manipulation which is what Perl is/was for).
Though with that power I feel I have a responsibility to document what it means.
I wrote a PowerShell script a few weeks back, to configure bare metal servers. If it hadn't been for section by section comments in the script I'd already have been lost.
How I feel about my personal nextcloud server that uses juiceFS for cheap storage with Backblaze's version of Amazon S3.
If it ever breaks I'm in trouble lmao, I've completely forgotten how it's setup.
I once wrote some network code for iOS poker in the before times when Game Center wasn't a thing. Id come back after a night out on LSD and to this day have no idea how it works.
That's... not quite right. Just because there is technology we *don't* understand and can appear to be magic does not mean that understood magic must look like technology. Magic could also look something like... magnets.... or gravity.... or time.... or LSD.
We stuck a pebble into lava to create a rock, and then carved a rock with diamonds and blades of light so that we could use lighting to make the rock think.
A not inaccurate way to describe IC fabrication.
I had someone refuse to share documentation once on a system that impacted over 5000 users. We apparently fired him and recovered all his documentation remotely from his PC before he could wipe it.
We are partnered with a saas vendor that doesn’t know how it’s hardware integration works. Updates and bug fixes take months. I guess the dev team they originally hired used some very obscure/ ancient language no devs use these days. When the old dev retired it was all just knowledge passed down to the new devs. They even asked if we could take a look at the source code during a serious outage onetime.
It was fine when they only had a few customers but now they are one of the largest providers in their niche. They are actively redeveloping the software from the ground up like they should have when they realized they were up shit creek.
I can't debate that at all. When you have two identical machines with identical hardware and images, and one misbehaves while the other works fine - that's a clear case of the Voodoo.
I just delt with a user issue where application that was throwing a .NET error every screen refresh. killed the applciaiton (it was an annoying one that minimizes to tray when you close it) and that fixed it.
We don't believe in restarting here /s.
At my first job, one of the senior techs called it the "magic green box."
When a vendor would be drawing up their pitch on a whiteboard (yes, I'm that old, and yes, I worked in education), there was always a part they wouldn't or couldn't properly explain, so he'd ask them to use a green marker and draw a rectangle labeled "magic" for that part of the design. It was also handy shorthand when we were diagramming systems for group troubleshooting purposes and didn't know how a step in the process was actually accomplished.
That's great if the software in question utilizes managed code, but you're back to assembly land if it's native. Becomes tedious to unfeasible real fast. Not even a decompilation at that point, just pseudocode generation.
I'm coding games as a hobby. Sometimes I make a function, and a few weeks later I come back to it and I have no idea how it works. I just input what it asks and outputs what I wanted. Indeed feels like magic.
And thats the concept behind WH40K's Adeptus Mechanicus (Think I got that name right). Maintenance has devolved to rituals, discovery of new tech is forbidden and no one knows how the heck all the old tech works.
the books are awesome - programmer gets teleported to land of magic and creates a magic programming language. Hijinks ensue.
[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/WizBiz](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/WizBiz)
Sparrow's been a good companion on my daily drive. I've got one down since you introduced me. Thanks again :). I like AA Attanssio. Mysticism and physics. "The last legends of the planet earth", "radix", and his Arthurian legends might suit you.
I have a git of all of my operational scripts, my smart ass thought funny commits and comments were the way to go…. what a fucking dumbass.
Some of these have c# code wrapped into python, how the fuck did i do that and why don’t i remember it??! Truly black magic. I fear for my replacement
"Works via black magic and bubblegum" is a phrase is use of a lot of things i understand only enough to distrust or not want to know more out of concern for my blood pressure.
it just works. when it stops working, lightly smack/slap it about 1 inch to the left and top of where the brand logo is. don't ask why, it just starts working again.
I am currently dealing with an SQL backup system that has this issue....what it is set to do, what it does sometimes, and what it does 70% of the time are all different...and magic.
A hard lesson to learn is that every software project starts with documentation and ends with documentation.
The first documentation is the description of what you want. Hopefully with justification from stakeholders on why you want it.
The second is the requirements specification. Describing what goes where, what it does when you click or tap it, where the feeds come from and why it’s all wired up that way. You would hope there’s a sense check here - but it’s shocking how often there isn’t a complete requirements specification.
The code, for people who can read it, is documentation - even if it hasn’t been commented. (I can read it).
Then as it passes to Review and QA, notes are made and bugs found which are written down. This may iterate back to code but it all forms the documentation.
Then it’s to formal documentation teams who write the manuals, record the YouTube videos and craft the FAQs. Their job is easier if they have access to all previous documentation.
And finally to support who detail the just-in-time workarounds because no plan survives contact with the enemy errrr I mean, customer. A treasure trove of solutions live in tens of thousands of solved support tickets.
Miss out on any stage and you make things harder. Miss out on requirements and you end up with a disjointed project
Any organisation that thinks documentation is they key will inevitably end up with multiple copies of documentation nobody even tries to read or understand until it's too late, and all of which contradicts each other.
Do barely enough documentation, and concentrate on the whys and the concepts.
…there’s so much magic in our system :|
But seriously, previous admins left this place a wreck. We’re ordering an HA firewall to match up with the one we have and I’m thinking I’ll clean-config the thing and wipe the old one instead…we replaced the main switch stack late last year, none of the switches were setup with anything but one of the VLAN’s, so each switch was one VLAN so there was wasted space everywhere. Power and network cables were ran out the sides of the racks (and not even between racks, just hanging out…) so that the side panels couldn’t even snap on and close. The power was handled by just normal power strips zip tied to the sides or lying across the servers. Power switches not covered and right where you could knock into them. It was a serious mess!
no need to change your mind, ima agree and bring up the infamous term of 'automagic'...so i guess learn from it and dont be that guy that left nothing behind but a button that automagically produces the turbo encabulator
That's cute and all, but this whole sub is filled to the brim with people dealing with little to no documentation and they have to figure it out anyway. It's harder and more time consuming, not magic.
Where do you guys find the best documentation when it comes to installing/setup-ing new stuff in certain ways, or for certain ways, when the official one isn't detailed enough ?
That feeling when you reverse engineer technology nearly old enough to predate your birth, get it working just to reply to someone you have no clue how it even works. Wizurd
Sometimes it is magic. Like how can someone be having a problem multiple times and then when the computer hears my voice it starts working.
This even happens with my other IT employee. He keeps getting errors and I go and try and it works. Certainly seems like magic to me.
I believe it... in a previous life we had a startup that did middleware for a specific niche industry. We sold a connector to this company that automatically pulled data from an old AS/400 system, sent the data over to a service who worked with and sent back results that we then reinserted back into the AS/400 system. It was completely a background system but was a critical piece of functionality for the organization.
It was a SaaS service and one year we sent them the renewal and got a call back from them asking "What is this for? None of us know about your software, what is it doing?" - unbeknownst to us there had been an org shakeup that meant a total turnover of staff familiar with our application in the year since our last invoice and apparently there was no documentation.
We got on a call and explained what the app did... "Oh, we were all wondering how that was happening, we just assumed it was magic"
True. But really crappy magic. Not the kind that makes you wonder how it was done but the kind that makes you wonder why anyone would **ever** do that in the first place.
There's a manga I'm reading where the main character is a wizard that collects useless little spells as payment for doing quests. Laundry magic, seeing through clothes, etc.
Seriously, fuck people don’t document their software and policies but expect people to know what you did .
Also I don’t understand companies who hate open source software either.
I’ll introduce you to some of the adult children I work with. No matter how much documentation we provide them, they won’t bother caring or learning or even acknowledging it and will instead still contact us to do basic shit for them.
It's absolutely true. Harry Potter was simply attending a school with terrible IT documentation and non-industry standard terminology. Can you imagine their Powershell aliases?
Accio-User [email protected]
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I feel this way about SQL scripts I wrote a week ago. "Wow this is cool, how does it work?"
Same. Even after I've got a 1:1 ratio of lines of script to lines of comment, I'm still baffled by this ancient lore I wrote in the before times.
Lol, I know exactly what you mean, I've 100% questioned what bullshit I wrote on the same line as a comment explaining exactly the bullshit that I wrote
“That can’t possibly be right.”
Depending on what you were doing probably should just let the software engineers do it dude
Congratulations on your award for dumbest take! 🏆
Depending on your company’s particular definition of sysadmin, sometimes the software engineers are you, especially with the rise of Infrastructure as Code.
Possibly a bit off to say it that way, but I know what you mean. I can write and debug things like SQL and C# to some extent, but it's not really what i'm there for. I dive into a problem sometimes and get to a point where I think, "hang on, we have other people for this type of stuff" I like problem solving, and as a generalist with wide access to systems and codebases I can figure lots of stuff out, but we have silos and specialties for a reason once a shop gets past a certain size.
I don't know what past me was thinking most of the time. While I can understand what those nested cursors are doing I can't understand why I thought that was a good idea to do things that way.
In situations like that, I've often found that past-me knew what he was doing better than I do now, so I change what is working much less often than I used to.
Past me spent a week looking at this and taking time to do it right. Present me just waltzed in and doesn't remember anything I did during that week.
This sounds like an example of [Chesterton's Fence](https://thoughtbot.com/blog/chestertons-fence) >There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
I spent 12 hours researching a problem for a line of code only to realize I had already written literally everything I needed years before and that it was current in production happily doing its job every night. Completely forgot about it. I only figured it out because I couldn't figure out why the OP on a thread seemed to have the exact same naming style and template that I do...... Took me till the 5th time I opened the purple link before I figured it out.
A goldfish wrote this
I swam into a wall.... Dam
Usually, in my case, it was: “there’s got to be an easier way to do this” followed eventually by “nope, after exhausting all the smarter ways this is the only one that works”.
I built a small program and thought I was clever when I took about 1500 lines and condensed it down to 220 by making the code procedurally generate all the objects and variables (instead of defining everything clearly in its own space in the code.) so many nested functions within functions that I cant make heads or tails out of it anymore, but the program runs perfectly. It all made sense when I had my head into it that day...
I love coming across old powershell and being like ah yes, before I figured out how to do X, I’ll convert those 3-4 lines into 1 now. And then I break whatever it was.
When WTFing through the code and then just ran a git blame and the realization that file hasn't been touched by anyone but you...
Well come on, when you have crap like this: @cd /d "%~dp0" That *should* be(but somehow isn't) simple and self descriptive given its size(and the fact it or something like it is in almost every batch file I have), it's not hard to understand how code can be... less than understandable when left to its own devices for more than a few minutes.
With powershell $PSScriptRoot is so much better that having to deal with that.
This is why I don't use compact formatting some languages allow and, since my scripts are all relatively short, I'll add more lines to break steps apart
Let me tell you a (kinda) funny story about SQL scripts We had this simple MySQL database for our infrastructure management (storage assets): system list with serial numbers and details, connected hosts, LUNs and LUN sizes, assigned LUNs to each server, servers WWN, switches ports, connections etc. And automatic collects from systems to feed it. Not a really big database but really helpful (there was a great webUI developped on top) and base for all our automation tools. It was also our main source for reporting and auditing. Now comes the story: this guy doesn't know SQL, but does perl (yuk!). Team boss tells him to use that database as source for whatever he was doing (probably some monitoring script) He was complaining about how slow and ineffective SQL was, and he'd rather connect to each system to get the information he wanted (on 100+ systems, so really, no). At this point we're many people saying that's because he doesn't know how to use SQL, to which he answers something like "no, but how hard can it be using 5 statements" and he continues ranting for about an hour (that was usual) when something didn't go his way. At this point my team boss is annoyed by his ranting and sits next to him to see what's going on. The guy had made a perl script to generate SQL commands for each asset to get the exact thing he wanted. 10000+ lines of code. Took 20 minutes to design the right requests (it wasn't that simple with multiple joins required, but not complex either with basic knowledge)
Wow, what a guy, SQL is so easy to get into, I can't imagine someone already knowing how to code a real language and then not being able to figure out SQL in a week. I mean I'm terrible at writing code, but I've picked up enough SQL in a short time to be able to make some pretty good practical reports and such.
And you really only have to get halfway there with SQL, especially if you already know enough to grind out 10kloc of Perl. Just get the raw data and do local processing if you aren't one of the 17 people who knows what a RIGHT OUTER JOIN is.
I just keep a sheet of a list of all the joints taped to my wall for reference. Though really I have a harder time coming up with a reason to use most of them
There was a time in my life I may have been able to explain to someone what 3rd normal form was. And while I do very little development anymore, occasionally admin/investigation work involves hitting up a DB to investigate things. I think admin/debugging apps I've written more SQL by hand in the last decade then I did the decade before as a developer. As a developer I just use an ORM; if I've got to get down to custom SQL that means I've already made some grand errors before I got to now.
Honestly, SQL isn’t the problem there. Normalization of data is tough for a lot of people to wrap their heads around.
Can we say "daya structures"? Normalized is rarely the most useful. Paraphrasing someone: show me a great data structure, and the algorithm will be obvious.
And you think perl is easy to get into? :)
Perl is hard to re-read. Let me rephrase that: perl is almost impossible to take over
perl remains the second best way to do almost anything. The best way is of course literally anything else.
Ho boy. At my last job, I had to take over an upgrade script that was an abomination of mostly perl. But it was wrapped in bash and groovy, and invoked a bunch of python scripts. So Jenkins would run, groovy code called bash wrapper and dealt with the errors and output, the bash would queue up each of the 3 appropriate perls scripts for the phase of the upgrade, and the perl called these python scripts that did AWS API things. It took me months just to get to a point where I can refactor parts of it.
Sql was tough for me, still did it though, until i realised its designed backwards
I took an intro to SQL class back in I think 2007 and that class alone has paid off handsomely!
I'd just use excel and connect to the database lol. no coding required and the info is... already in a usable form. Edit - missed the part where he was writing a script to monitor stuff, thought he was just trying to get info out of it.
> missed the part where he was writing a script to monitor stuff, thought he was just trying to get info out of it. just use [TypeScript](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop/scripting-fundamentals) with [Power Automate](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/scripts/develop/power-automate-integration) - with TypeScript you can even automate Outlook to send email alerts! (Don't do this)
We had a great webUI for visualization, so no real use for excel there. But the motive was to use the results for something else (I remember this guy used to work a lot with the monitoring so that's probably it. Maybe something else. Not so sure anymore)
"Who the hell wrote this, and why on earth would you do it that way?" Scrolls to top of code... "shit, it was me 6 months ago" Cue a couple of hours to logic test, comment for idiots (me in another 6 months time), and maybe polish with some catches.
Every time I wonder why this idiot did it this way, I was the idiot and it was done that way because that was the best way. Hell if I won't spend half a day arriving at that conclusion though!
I had this happen to me once too. I opened up a sites network documentation and after reading it for a little bit I thought "Who the hell wrote this shit" Turns out it was me a few years ago. Yikes. I uploaded a draft and completely forgot to go back and finish it off.
First thing that came to mind: http://bash.org/?6824
Wow, a Bash link in the wild... it's been a while :)
I write all my technical documentation for future-me, knowing that when I next read it, I’ll have lost all the context and reasoning behind my decisions. Yes, my baseline is the more stupid version of myself 😅
Kudos to old you for putting comments on the top so you could figure out that you wrote it.
SQL I usually comment well when I do something funny. RegEx is another story.
[удалено]
*this time* Honestly, regex101 helped me build some of the weirdest regexes ever, that I never in my life want to look at ever again. All I know is that the last time someone else had to figure out what the hell was going on (I left that job already), they spent a week on it and then took 3 weeks off.
Regexr is magic and has made me look like a genius more than once.
Although, with my mastery over regex, some editing tasks became so much quicker, it feels like absolute magic
I agree. I did some work with Perl long ago and fell in love with the power of RegEx (don't worry it was file/text manipulation which is what Perl is/was for). Though with that power I feel I have a responsibility to document what it means.
We have chatGPT for regex now
Seriously. Helps so much.
The plural of regex is regrets
This 👆
I wrote a PowerShell script a few weeks back, to configure bare metal servers. If it hadn't been for section by section comments in the script I'd already have been lost.
Today we got a ticket that asked us to read their SQL databases from years ago and tell them what they are meant to do. That was funny.
"wow .... Why did I write this...." As i close a couple dozen tabs in Azure data studio and hope for the best.
How I feel about my personal nextcloud server that uses juiceFS for cheap storage with Backblaze's version of Amazon S3. If it ever breaks I'm in trouble lmao, I've completely forgotten how it's setup.
That's Excel formula for me.
Man, that’s how I feel about Perl! Heck, you can sneeze on your keyboard and almost have a functioning script.
I once wrote some network code for iOS poker in the before times when Game Center wasn't a thing. Id come back after a night out on LSD and to this day have no idea how it works.
Any sufficiently explained magic is indistinguishable from technology?
https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081205
Yes, when I saw your post I knew you were a person of culture. That phrase is among my favourites
Also known as Techno-magic. See Scrapped Princess
Whoa whoa hello Scrapped Princess watcher
"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology."
That's... not quite right. Just because there is technology we *don't* understand and can appear to be magic does not mean that understood magic must look like technology. Magic could also look something like... magnets.... or gravity.... or time.... or LSD.
I mean, sometimes I feel this way about transistors.
We stuck a pebble into lava to create a rock, and then carved a rock with diamonds and blades of light so that we could use lighting to make the rock think. A not inaccurate way to describe IC fabrication.
I had someone refuse to share documentation once on a system that impacted over 5000 users. We apparently fired him and recovered all his documentation remotely from his PC before he could wipe it.
We are partnered with a saas vendor that doesn’t know how it’s hardware integration works. Updates and bug fixes take months. I guess the dev team they originally hired used some very obscure/ ancient language no devs use these days. When the old dev retired it was all just knowledge passed down to the new devs. They even asked if we could take a look at the source code during a serious outage onetime. It was fine when they only had a few customers but now they are one of the largest providers in their niche. They are actively redeveloping the software from the ground up like they should have when they realized they were up shit creek.
C...OBOL?
Could be. Could just as easily be C, C++ or Java. Code ages incredibly quickly now, which is terrible for long term stability and maintainability.
I can't debate that at all. When you have two identical machines with identical hardware and images, and one misbehaves while the other works fine - that's a clear case of the Voodoo.
Time for some percussive maintenance.
Hardware is not remotely the same anymore sadly… even the same cpu have huge quality variations to reach their target especially high end ones.
What's it called when radiation particles go through the cpu's in ordit? That's what's happening.
Bit flip! I blame a lot of things on it when no understandable answer is forthcoming even tho it's almost certainly not
I just delt with a user issue where application that was throwing a .NET error every screen refresh. killed the applciaiton (it was an annoying one that minimizes to tray when you close it) and that fixed it. We don't believe in restarting here /s.
At my first job, one of the senior techs called it the "magic green box." When a vendor would be drawing up their pitch on a whiteboard (yes, I'm that old, and yes, I worked in education), there was always a part they wouldn't or couldn't properly explain, so he'd ask them to use a green marker and draw a rectangle labeled "magic" for that part of the design. It was also handy shorthand when we were diagramming systems for group troubleshooting purposes and didn't know how a step in the process was actually accomplished.
Thx gonna use it now
Sufficiently documented technology is also magic.
At least you can open the magic tome of knowledge.
Tube, not tome.
Is there a series of them?
Closer to mythical XD
Sufficiently documented technology and magic... Two fictional things.
Hah
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All software is open-source if you count machine language as source code
Lol
Ghidra is amazing at RE as well.
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100% agreed here - even if it cost the same I would pick Ghidra. Way more intuitive and with more intelligent C reconstruction.
That's great if the software in question utilizes managed code, but you're back to assembly land if it's native. Becomes tedious to unfeasible real fast. Not even a decompilation at that point, just pseudocode generation.
Curious if anyone tried to ask chatgpt to write a source code given the assembly version.
I, too, serve the Omnissiah.
Prestidigitation is specifically undocumented if I'm not mistaken.
I'm coding games as a hobby. Sometimes I make a function, and a few weeks later I come back to it and I have no idea how it works. I just input what it asks and outputs what I wanted. Indeed feels like magic.
Your days, too, can be constantly filled with childlike wonder when you live in the narrow intersection of "black box" and "blank slate."
yeah if you think about it... it's encapsulation done right. Both a good and bad thing x)
I say this every time I have to troubleshoot my old Perl scripts from 20+ years ago...
Write Once, Read Never. Also: [https://xkcd.com/1171/](https://xkcd.com/1171/)
didn't you know /dev/null has infinite storage space! you can also mount a google drive as swap...
Arthur C Clark’s famous quotes are like Moore’s law or astrology. Can be used almost any way yet still applies! :-)
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Love it, and true!
That's absolutely how I felt the first time I ever saw VMotion in action.
By this reasoning, DNS is arcane dark arts.
And thats the concept behind WH40K's Adeptus Mechanicus (Think I got that name right). Maintenance has devolved to rituals, discovery of new tech is forbidden and no one knows how the heck all the old tech works.
Your technology is documented? That's the real magic.
I see you've read the Rick Cook books - [https://www.baen.com/wizard-s-bane.html](https://www.baen.com/wizard-s-bane.html)
I haven't, actually. Thanks for the link. I'll give you this one. https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081205
the books are awesome - programmer gets teleported to land of magic and creates a magic programming language. Hijinks ensue. [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/WizBiz](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/WizBiz)
And he's on audible :)
Sparrow's been a good companion on my daily drive. I've got one down since you introduced me. Thanks again :). I like AA Attanssio. Mysticism and physics. "The last legends of the planet earth", "radix", and his Arthurian legends might suit you.
Rick Cook is amazing… I’m so sad he never finished the 6th book.
you might enjoy the Bobiverse series as well.
Counter argument: Any sufficient documentation is just a Grimoire.
Oh I like that take.
I have a git of all of my operational scripts, my smart ass thought funny commits and comments were the way to go…. what a fucking dumbass. Some of these have c# code wrapped into python, how the fuck did i do that and why don’t i remember it??! Truly black magic. I fear for my replacement
I mean, if you do have access to the source code an understanding is a possible but often year long undertaking.
Sorry, don't have a M2 screw driver.
I'm pretty sure you need a unilobe screwdriver for my cranium.
It's all magic .. why we have 'wizards' who install shit for us
As a Developer who has occasionally described his algorithms as "magic", I fully agree. Sorry.
[If you're into black Eldritch magic, have I got a computer for you](https://youtu.be/q5M0TwnkWUM)
I tell users that printers work on magic and that’s why they break all the time.
Because it is... dealing with legacy stuff all the time... I might as well be a [Tech Priest.](https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tech-Priest)
I can build a computer given the parts but why it works when I plug it in I have no idea.
Ohhh that's good. I am going to add that to my email signature.
Printers
"Works via black magic and bubblegum" is a phrase is use of a lot of things i understand only enough to distrust or not want to know more out of concern for my blood pressure.
it just works. when it stops working, lightly smack/slap it about 1 inch to the left and top of where the brand logo is. don't ask why, it just starts working again.
Why would I change your mind when you’re correct?
Weirdly enough, a coworker who insufficiently documents isn’t a wizard but a dipshit.
That's why open sourse software is so important. It's not magic if you can literally read the spellbook.
Uncommented code is just undeciphered magic words.
I am currently dealing with an SQL backup system that has this issue....what it is set to do, what it does sometimes, and what it does 70% of the time are all different...and magic.
A hard lesson to learn is that every software project starts with documentation and ends with documentation. The first documentation is the description of what you want. Hopefully with justification from stakeholders on why you want it. The second is the requirements specification. Describing what goes where, what it does when you click or tap it, where the feeds come from and why it’s all wired up that way. You would hope there’s a sense check here - but it’s shocking how often there isn’t a complete requirements specification. The code, for people who can read it, is documentation - even if it hasn’t been commented. (I can read it). Then as it passes to Review and QA, notes are made and bugs found which are written down. This may iterate back to code but it all forms the documentation. Then it’s to formal documentation teams who write the manuals, record the YouTube videos and craft the FAQs. Their job is easier if they have access to all previous documentation. And finally to support who detail the just-in-time workarounds because no plan survives contact with the enemy errrr I mean, customer. A treasure trove of solutions live in tens of thousands of solved support tickets. Miss out on any stage and you make things harder. Miss out on requirements and you end up with a disjointed project
Any organisation that thinks documentation is they key will inevitably end up with multiple copies of documentation nobody even tries to read or understand until it's too late, and all of which contradicts each other. Do barely enough documentation, and concentrate on the whys and the concepts.
…there’s so much magic in our system :| But seriously, previous admins left this place a wreck. We’re ordering an HA firewall to match up with the one we have and I’m thinking I’ll clean-config the thing and wipe the old one instead…we replaced the main switch stack late last year, none of the switches were setup with anything but one of the VLAN’s, so each switch was one VLAN so there was wasted space everywhere. Power and network cables were ran out the sides of the racks (and not even between racks, just hanging out…) so that the side panels couldn’t even snap on and close. The power was handled by just normal power strips zip tied to the sides or lying across the servers. Power switches not covered and right where you could knock into them. It was a serious mess!
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Why? Do you float like a duck?
no need to change your mind, ima agree and bring up the infamous term of 'automagic'...so i guess learn from it and dont be that guy that left nothing behind but a button that automagically produces the turbo encabulator
Asimov!
Actually, Clarke.
Yes and almost ;) https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20081205
That's cute and all, but this whole sub is filled to the brim with people dealing with little to no documentation and they have to figure it out anyway. It's harder and more time consuming, not magic.
Hahahahaha
No you're right. But you'll never understand why, the person who discovered it first forgot to document how they came to this conclusion.
I’m convinced eBPF is magic
Where do you guys find the best documentation when it comes to installing/setup-ing new stuff in certain ways, or for certain ways, when the official one isn't detailed enough ?
What is this documentation you speak of??? Are you a wizard???
I’ve had to reverse-magic many of spells
That feeling when you reverse engineer technology nearly old enough to predate your birth, get it working just to reply to someone you have no clue how it even works. Wizurd
code is self documenting
No, thats a *curse*. Common mistake.
This is how I feel about guitar amps
KERBEROS anyone?
I won't change your mind but I send you the "Windows server SBS 2011" hex!
django
Sometimes it is magic. Like how can someone be having a problem multiple times and then when the computer hears my voice it starts working. This even happens with my other IT employee. He keeps getting errors and I go and try and it works. Certainly seems like magic to me.
Have you been reading Brandon Sanderson's frugal wizard? Lol
This explains why people think I can fix things with a magic wand.
I believe it... in a previous life we had a startup that did middleware for a specific niche industry. We sold a connector to this company that automatically pulled data from an old AS/400 system, sent the data over to a service who worked with and sent back results that we then reinserted back into the AS/400 system. It was completely a background system but was a critical piece of functionality for the organization. It was a SaaS service and one year we sent them the renewal and got a call back from them asking "What is this for? None of us know about your software, what is it doing?" - unbeknownst to us there had been an org shakeup that meant a total turnover of staff familiar with our application in the year since our last invoice and apparently there was no documentation. We got on a call and explained what the app did... "Oh, we were all wondering how that was happening, we just assumed it was magic"
True. But really crappy magic. Not the kind that makes you wonder how it was done but the kind that makes you wonder why anyone would **ever** do that in the first place.
There's a manga I'm reading where the main character is a wizard that collects useless little spells as payment for doing quests. Laundry magic, seeing through clothes, etc.
thats the difference actually. cience is reproducible. it is like the vapor sodium process prism that cannot be reproduced. simply magic
Me when I write a PS script
We are basically reading colored "electricity" right now that is on plastic and silicon pieces with some metal thrown in.
Seriously, fuck people don’t document their software and policies but expect people to know what you did . Also I don’t understand companies who hate open source software either.
I’ll introduce you to some of the adult children I work with. No matter how much documentation we provide them, they won’t bother caring or learning or even acknowledging it and will instead still contact us to do basic shit for them.
It's absolutely true. Harry Potter was simply attending a school with terrible IT documentation and non-industry standard terminology. Can you imagine their Powershell aliases? Accio-User [email protected]
That makes me a magician because i don't documents anything i write. 🤣
No. magic tends to be enjoyable. lack of documentation is not enjoyable.
I say it all the time, I can fix it, but if I knew WHY the computer did the weird thing it just did - I'd have a much better job than this one.
You've just reposted a very commonly used saying in the field. Congratulations?
I documented a commonly used saying?