This is the third part of my ongoing series "The Ballad of the Six Witchers and the Undocumented Java Tool".
In this part, we have the massive Battle of Sparks and Storms.

The first part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5009817/...

The second part is here: https://devrant.com/rants/5054467/...

Over the last couple sprints and then some, The Witcher Who Writes and the Butchers of Jarfile had studied the decompiled guts of the Undocumented Java Beast and finally derived (most of) the process by which the data was transformed. They even built a model to replicate the results in small scale.
But when such process was presented to the Priests of Accounting at the Temple of Cash-Flow, chaos ensued.
This cannot be! - cried the priests - You must be wrong!
Wrong, the Witchers were not. In every single test case the Priests of Accounting threw at the Witchers, their model predicted perfectly what would be registered by the Undocumented Java Tool at the very end.
It was not the Witchers. The process was corrupted at its essence.

The Witchers reconvened at their fortress of Sprint. In the dark room of Standup, the leader of their order, wise beyond his years (and there were plenty of those), in a deep and solemn voice, there declared:
"Guys, we must not fuck this up." (actual quote)
For the leader of the witchers had just returned from a war council at the capitol of the province. There, heading a table boarding the Archpriest of Accounting, the Augur of Economics, the Marketing Spymaster and Admiral of the Fleet, was the Ciefoh Seat himself.
They had heard rumors about the Order of the Witchers' battles and operations. They wanted to know more.

It was quiet that night in the flat and cloudy plains of Cluster of Sparks and Storms. The Ciefoh Seat had ordered the thunder to stay silent, so that the forces of whole cluster would be available for the Witchers.
The cluster had solid ground for Hive and Parquet turf, and extended from the Connection River to farther than the horizon.
The Witcher Who Writes, seated high atop his war-elephant, looked at the massive battle formations behind.
The frontline were all war-elephants of Hadoop, their mahouts the Witchers themselves.
For the right flank, the Red Port of Redis had sent their best connectors - currency conversions would happen by the hundreds, instantly and always updated.
The left flank had the first and second army of Coroutine Jugglers, trained by the Witchers. Their swift catapults would be able to move data to and from the JIRA cities. No data point will be left behind.
At the center were thousands of Sparks mounting their RDD warhorses. Organized in formations designed by the Witchers and the Priestesses of Accounting, those armoured and strong units were native to this cloudy landscape. This was their home, and they were ready to defend it.
For the enemy could be seen in the horizon.

There were terabytes of data crossing the Stony Event Bridge. Hundreds of millions of datapoints, eager to flood the memory of every system and devour the processing time of every node on sight.
For the Ciefoh Seat, in his fury about the wrong calculations of the processes of the past, had ruled that the Witchers would not simply reshape the data from now on.
The Witchers were to process the entire historical ledger of transactions. And be done before the end of the month.

The metrics rumbled under the weight of terabytes of data crossing the Event Bridge. With fire in their eyes, the war-elephants in the frontline advanced.
Hundreds of data points would be impaled by their tusks and trampled by their feet, pressed into the parquet and hive grounds. But hundreds more would take their place. There were too many data points for the Hadoop war-elephants alone.
But the dawn will come.
When the night seemed darker, the Witchers heard a thunder, and the skies turned red. The Sparks were on the move.
Riding into the parquet and hive turf, impaling scores of data points with their long SIMD lances and chopping data off with their Scala swords, the Sparks burned through the enemy like fire.
The second line of the sparks would pick data off to be sent by the Coroutine Jugglers to JIRA. That would provoke even more data to cross the Event Bridge, but the third line of Sparks were ready for it - those data would be pierced by the rounds provided by the Red Port of Redis, and sent back to JIRA - for good.

They fought for six days and six nights, taking turns so that the battles would not stop. And then, silence. The day was won, all the data crushed into hive and parquet.

Short-lived was the relief. The Witchers knew that the enemy in combat is but a shadow of the troubles that approach. Politics and greed and grudge are all next in line. Are the Witchers heroes or marauders? The aftermath is to come, and I will keep you posted.

MySQL 5.7.32 breaks innodb zlib compression in combination with xtrabackup.

Oracle started the trend to break GA cycles....

https://percona.com/blog/2020/...

Seems like the MySQL ecosystem finally splits in MariaDB (as 10.5 renamed MySQL to Mariadb) and MySQL.

I hope Oracle MySQL dies.

What Oracle does is beyond madness.

MariaDB 10.5 has it's troubles too. But at least you can look up their sources, check their bugtracker and don't get surprise foot fisting up your arse.

It's 2023 and smartphones can't even properly upload files in background.

When an upload is running in background while I watch YouTube or use other apps, the upload just stops at some point. The speed indicator in the top bar goes down to a few KB/s and I know immediately the upload has stopped well before it could have finished.

When re-opening the tab, I see a blank page and a loading bar. This means the tab has unloaded. Now I will have to re-select all those files again, which comes with its own troubles ( https://devrant.com/rants/9879401/... ).

Mobile browsers need to have a "protect this tab from unloading" option. Samsung already introduced a "keep open" option in the task switcher to protect individual apps from unloading in background. Why not do this on tab level?

Once the user locks their screen, this alone might interrupt the uploading process. On laptops and desktop computers, the upload keeps running in background.

Come on, this should be as easy as childs' play for billion-dollar corporations. Aren't smartphones "smart" enough to detect that a page is currently uploading files so its tab is not unloaded?

If smartphones can not accomplish this simple task that desktop computers and laptops can easily handle since the 2000s, it is a sad and embarrassing state.

In reply to this:
https://devrant.com/rants/260590/...

As a senior dev for over 13 years, I will break you point by point in the most realistic way, so you don't get in troubles for following internet boring paternal advices.

1) False. Being go-ahead, pro active and prone to learn is a good thing in most places.
This doesn't mean being an entitled asshole, but standing for yourself (don't get put down and used to do shit for others, or it will become the routine) and show good learning and exploration skills will definitely put you under a good light.
2)False. 2 things to check:
a) if the guy over you is an entitled asshole who thinkg you're going to steal his job and will try to sabotage you or not answer acting annoyed, or if it's a cool guy.
Choose wisely your questions and put them all togheter. Don't be that guy that fires questions in crumbles, one every 2 minutes.
Put them togheter and try to work out the obvious and what can be done through google or chatgpt by yourself. Then collect the hard ones for the experienced guy and ask them all at once. He's been put over you to help you.

3) Idiotic. NO.
Working code = good code. It's always been like this.
If you follow this idiotic advice you will annoy everyone.
The thing about renaming variables and crap it's called a standard. Most company will have a document with one if there is a need to follow it.
What remains are common programming conventions that everyone mostly follows.

Else you'll end up getting crazy at all the rules and small conventions and will start to do messy hot spaghetti code filled with syntactic sugar that no one likes, included yourself.

4)LMAO.
This mostly never happens (seniors send to juniors) in real life.
But it happens on the other side (junior code gets reviewed).
He must either be a crap programmer or stopped learning years ago(?)

5) This is absolutely true.
Programming is not a forgiving job if you're not honest.
Covering up mess in programming is mostly impossible, expecially when git and all that stuff with your name on it came out.
Be honest, admit your faults, ask if not sure.
Code is code, if it's wrong it won't work magically and sooner or later it will fire back.

6)Somewhat true, but it all depends on the deadline you're given and the complexity of the logic to be implemented.
If very complex you have to divide an conquer (usually)

7)LMAO, this one might be true for multi billionaire companies with thousand of employees.
Normal companies rarely do that because it's a waste of time. They pass knowledge by word or with concise documentation that later gets explained by seniors or TL's to the devs.
Try following this and as a junior:
1) you will have written shit docs and wasted time
2) you will come up to the devs at the deadline with half of the code done and them saying wtf who told you to do that

8) See? What an oxymoron ahahah
Look at point 3 of this guy than re-read this.
This alone should prove you that I'm right for everything else.

9) Half true.
Watch your ass. You need to understand what you're going to put yourself into.
If it's some unknown deep sea shit, with no documentations whatsoever you will end up with a sore ass and pulling your hair finding crumbles of code that make that unknown thing work.
Believe me and not him.
I have been there. To say one, I've been doing some high level project for using powerful RFID reading antennas for doing large warehouse inventory with high speed (instead of counting manually or scanning pieces, the put rfid tags inside the boxes and pass a scanner between shelves, reading all the inventory).
I had to deal with all the RFID protocol, the math behind radio waves (yes, knowing it will let you configure them more efficently and avoid conflicts), know a whole new SDK from them I've never used again (useless knowledge = time wasted and no resume worthy material for your next job) and so on.
It was a grueling, hair pulling, horrible experience that brought me nothing in return execpt the skill of accepting and embracing the pain of such experiences.

And I can go on with other stories. Horror Stories.
If it's something that is doable but it's complex, hard or just interesting, go for it. Expecially if the tech involved is something marketable.

10) Yes, and you can't stop learning, expecially now that AI will start to cover more and more of our work.

!rant
It's rather a question. I am thinking of changing my Linux distro from Lubuntu to Arch Linux or Gentoo.

My main reason is that I want to achieve customizability and the freedom that Linux offer and also build my distro from ground up.
Second reason is that I want to switch a little bit I am using Lubuntu for 2-3 years and is worked great for me. Especially because I have an older laptop (Asus K53E) and windows 7 worked really slow on it. But with this distro, everything works much faster and has all features and tools for programming that I need despite being minimalistic.

I have also used other distros before this one. These are some of them that I can remember Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, Bodhi Linux.

I would say for myself that I am quite familiar with terminal and I also wrote some bash scripts on complexity level like these: https://github.com/RokKos/..., https://github.com/RokKos/...

But my main concern is that would fail to install any of this two distros or that I would damage my computer beyond repair...

So my main questions are:
What are you experience with this two distros?
Did you have any troubles installing and setting up distro?
What is overall experience with this two distros?
Was is worth to switch to any of these two?

And you could also share what distro you are using and maybe some rants that occur using them.

Previously: https://devrant.com/rants/1418829/...

So, I've successfully finished my final project, but at some point I was having massive troubles.

For some fucking reason, the chip select line was not going high after turning low...

Apparently the led was pulling it down permanently...

Another weekend wasted...