EoS1: This is the continuation of my previous rant, "The Ballad of The Six Witchers and The Undocumented Java Tool". Catch the first part here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The Undocumented Java Tool, created by Those Who Came Before to fight the great battles of the past, is a swift beast. It reaches systems unknown and impacts many processes, unbeknownst even to said processes' masters. All from within it's lair, a foggy Windows Server swamp of moldy data streams and boggy flows.

One of The Six Witchers, the Wild One, scouted ahead to map the input and output data streams of the Unmapped Data Swamp. Accompanied only by his animal familiars, NetCat and WireShark.

Two others, bold and adventurous, raised their decompiling blades against the Undocumented Java Tool beast itself, to uncover it's data processing secrets.

Another of the witchers, of dark complexion and smooth speak, followed the data upstream to find where the fuck the limited excel sheets that feeds The Beast comes from, since it's handlers only know that "every other day a new one appears on this shared active directory location". WTF do people often have NPC-levels of unawareness about their own fucking jobs?!?!

The other witchers left to tend to the Burn-Rate Bonfire, for The Sprint is dark and full of terrors, and some bigwigs always manage to shoehorn their whims/unrelated stories into a otherwise lean sprint.

At the dawn of the new year, the witchers reconvened. "The Beast breathes a currency conversion API" - said The Wild One - "And it's claws and fangs strike mostly at two independent JIRA clusters, sometimes upserting issues. It uses a company-deprecated API to send emails. We're in deep shit."

"I've found The Source of Fucking Excel Sheets" - said the smooth witcher - "It is The Temple of Cash-Flow, where the priests weave the Tapestry of Transactions. Our Fucking Excel Sheets are but a snapshot of the latest updates on the balance of some billing accounts. I spoke with one of the priestesses, and she told me that The Oracle (DB) would be able to provide us with The Data directly, if we were to learn the way of the ODBC and the Query"

"We stroke at the beast" - said the bold and adventurous witchers, now deserving of the bragging rights to be called The Butchers of Jarfile - "It is actually fewer than twenty classes and modules. Most are API-drivers. And less than 40% of the code is ever even fucking used! We found fucking JIRA API tokens and URIs hard-coded. And it is all synchronous and monolithic - no wonder it takes almost 20 hours to run a single fucking excel sheet".

Together, the witchers figured out that each new billing account were morphed by The Beast into a new JIRA issue, if none was open yet for it. Transactions were used to update the outstanding balance on the issues regarding the billing accounts. The currency conversion API was used too often, and it's purpose was only to give a rough estimate of the total balance in each Jira issue in USD, since each issue could have transactions in several currencies. The Beast would consume the Excel sheet, do some cryptic transformations on it, and for each resulting line access the currency API and upsert a JIRA issue. The secrets of those transformations were still hidden from the witchers. When and why would The Beast send emails, was still a mistery.

As the Witchers Council approached an end and all were armed with knowledge and information, they decided on the next steps.
The Wild Witcher, known in every tavern in the land and by the sea, would create a connector to The Red Port of Redis, where every currency conversion is already updated by other processes and can be quickly retrieved inside the VPC. The Greenhorn Witcher is to follow him and build an offline process to update balances in JIRA issues.
The Butchers of Jarfile were to build The Juggler, an automation that should be able to receive a parquet file with an insertion plan and asynchronously update the JIRA API with scores of concurrent requests.
The Smooth Witcher, proud of his new lead, was to build The Oracle Watch, an order that would guard the Oracle (DB) at the Temple of Cash-Flow and report every qualifying transaction to parquet files in AWS S3. The Data would then be pushed to cross The Event Bridge into The Cluster of Sparks and Storms.
This Witcher Who Writes is to ride the Elephant of Hadoop into The Cluster of Sparks an Storms, to weave the signs of Map and Reduce and with speed and precision transform The Data into The Insertion Plan.
However, how exactly is The Data to be transformed is not yet known.

Will the Witchers be able to build The Data's New Path? Will they figure out the mysterious transformation? Will they discover the Undocumented Java Tool's secrets on notifying customers and aggregating data?

This story is still afoot. Only the future will tell, and I will keep you posted.

Well after having a major sense of humour failure last week https://devrant.com/rants/1365062/...

My company has an internal application that is used for billing clients and customers. There are several versions.

Starting next week the consultant who wrote this and I will be sitting down together for about 2 hours or so twice a week to start going through the code stuff etc.

I already have a job to start testing a new version this program, and this version is going to be handed over to me and will be my baby.

Things are starting to look up, I’m still trying to get them to swap my PC for a laptop though, so I can do work from home etc.

So related to my previous rant about monkeys:

https://devrant.io/rants/596563/...

I happened to come across an old PPTX I made for our company's "new goal" (~4 years old) for Engineering Excellence. (I was searching my PC for old evidence to resolve a dispute with health care provider... staffed by monkeys... that keeps billing me for random amounts even though I paid the correct amounts... 3 years ago)

https://drive.google.com/open/...

Thoughts?

Hello everyone!

Since this is such a cool community with so many app devs, I though it would be cool to share with you all a project the company I work with its currently developing.

The name is appcoins, and it's a blockchain project that aims to solve 3 big problems that devs, users, Appstores and oems face everyday in the current apps ecosystem:
- the advertising: create a trustworthy advertise system for your apps, where you can actually invest money that will be spent on users that will use your apps; currently is a system where everyone is trying to fool everyone.
- Malware and Adware detection: create a system powered by the community to rank dev's apps, using a reputation system, and dispute by bidding. currently it's an unscalable system, with many detection flaws.
- In app billing (aka IAB): offer a new and easy way for users to buy cool things in your app, even if they don't have access to a credit card or other payment methods. Users will be rewarded by trying out your cool apps. Also opens the door for payments with crypto currencies in AppStores.

This is just a quick overall idea of the all project. If you're interested, checkout the website https://appcoins.io/

If you've any question or suggestion, let me know and I'll try to answer as best as I can, or redirect to my devRant coworkers.
Any feedback you may have, feel free to share it! This system is designed for us all devs, so your input is really appreciated.

Thank you all, and sorry for the long post.

Just discovered "git hours" (https://github.com/kimmobrunfeldt/...) and it's as simple as awesome! I'm gonna start using it in combination with RescueTime to check how accurate are my estimations... Any thoughts, suggestions or experiences on this, guys?