Notes: English

Our lead developer recently shared some insights about our work — specifically, developing ERP systems on 1C for the UAE and, more recently, Saudi Arabia. The session was hosted by the online English school Across, so the audience was spot-on: Russian-speaking folks interested in building careers and exploring international markets.

Overall, it turned out pretty cool, especially as a language practice. Just a reminder: learning foreign languages is still one of the best ways to give your brain a workout, and it’s also super accessible. There’s no shortage of resources, communities, and interest-based clubs out there — you just need the motivation :)

I love digging into the origins of words from time to time. For example, "log" comes from maritime terminology and literally means a log: a wooden float attached to a rope, which was thrown overboard from a ship. The rope had knots tied at regular intervals, and by counting how many knots unwound in a certain amount of time, sailors could determine the speed of the ship.

These measurements were recorded in the ship's journal, which was also called a log. Over time, the term started being used for any kind of record or journal of events, and in IT, the word got a second life :)

Or take "bug" — well, you’ve probably heard about this one. A moth, which messed with a computer’s operation over seventy years ago, was documented in the log as "the first actual case of a bug being found". The insect gained a kind of digital immortality: now any mistake, especially in a program, is called a bug.

(It’s just a pity that it wasn’t a prettier insect — like a butterfly, for instance? That would’ve added a touch of romance to our work)

(Though, if you think about it... maybe "bug" isn’t such a bad option after all. "Butterfly" is a bit too long. Someone would’ve shortened it to "butt" and right now, we’d be fixing butts instead of bugs)

I was listening to Be Somebody by Thousand Foot Krutch yesterday and suddenly caught the phrase “you made my window a door”. I used to think that this idiom is rather funny: like, damn, the idea to replace a window with a door somehow sounds unsafe. You can fall from the tenth floor, you know?

At the same time, the song is wonderful and not about that at all! I got curious and started digging around to find out what meaning native speakers put into it.

It turned out that it is actually about two different positions: a passive observer and an active participant. That is, if there is a window in front of you, you only look through it at something or someone. But you can open the door and finally do something. Hence, “when I could only see the floor you made my window a door” means something like “when my hands dropped, you helped me up”.

By the way, there is another similar idiom — “to be a better window than a door”. The abstraction here is the same: if a person is like a window, and not a door — they hardly ever let people close to them, making passive observers even out of people very close to them.

Among our projects, we have one where two systems are communicating with each other: ERP and CRM. Data exchange is done well: a push'n'pull server has been set up, subscriptions to events have been registered, a REST API has been implemented, and so on. There are many other fascinating technical details, but I'm not talking about that now.

The exchange has various logic chains inside. For instance, if a new company appears in CRM, it sends the data to ERP. The other day, a problem appeared: a company was not sent from the CRM, no matter how many times you tried to write it. So we went to investigate, suspecting the worst: CRM is written in PHP (nothing personal; it’s just not our technical stack), and there’s a lot of different legacy stuff there. It's easier to shoot yourself in the foot than to blow your nose.

However, it didn't take much digging. We opened the company’s page in CRM and saw that he had the “Do Not Export To ERP” checkbox, which, in fact, blocked the sending. A manager made an obvious mistake.

Should we uncheck the box and close the ticket?

This will solve the problem with that particular company, but not the reason it appeared. It is actually in the interface, specifically in the name of the option: “do not” is used, which is advisable to avoid due to the fact that it is more difficult for users to read the wording correctly. By the way, this also applies to a simple “do”.

It is often difficult for programmers to understand why this is so: we are used to instantly calculating Boolean expressions in our heads, and variations like “not (not true)” are commonplace for us. But people with a different background can get confused. Just a little, but sometimes this is enough for them to perceive “do not export” as “do export” in the heat of the day, click the option, and move on.

To sum up, the solution is to rename the checkbox. “Disable Export” or “Stop Export” are both fine, for example. “Prohibit Export” also comes to mind, but it’s more about interpersonal relationships, and in general, a ban on doing something does not mean that it won’t be done :)

Recently, I was working with vocabulary in an attempt to describe my latest adventures to an English-speaking friend and got to know about the colorful idiom “to go postal”. It means something like “go crazy with anger”; appeared somewhere between the 80s and 90s in the USA after a series of rather insane incidents in which postal workers went crazy and attacked people around, including colleagues and visitors.

The expression sounds funny at first glance, but the story behind the scenes is painfully gloomy. I think I will continue to use the good old “to go ballistic”. Literally, “get angry that strong so you become a rocket which lost control”. Or, to simplify, “explode with anger”.

By the way, there are similar rocket-like connotations in Russian, but for some reason they are about a more manageable cases. Mostly, they implies something like "the fire in the ass was so damn strong that the poor guy left Earth and successfully landed on Mars". Sounds a bit better than a simple explosion — you didn't completely waste the precious resource, at least :-)

Oh, shoot! Just watched the video and realized that I got used to writing OK in morning statuses when asked “how do you feel today”. Like, everything is normal with me, I'm alive and doing well, nothing affects my work, etc.

Now I'm afraid to guess what colleagues thought about me. I hope they also did not know that okay in the answer to such a question does not mean okay at all :-)

Cambridge just sent me results of my FCE exam in June and — dramatic drum roll — I passed it! According to the statement of results, I made a bunch of mistakes in writing tasks but particularly took it out during a Speaking test. It's a pity that examiners don't give comments and reasons so it's hard to estimate the results properly; however, it's quite clear what to do next :) My English teacher said that Cambridge used to provide an overall score only earlier and it sounded like “take it any way you want, dear pretenders”.

Well, I guess I should begin my preparation for CAE in the next year.

Speaking about languages, I remembered Feynman with his famous “Surely You're Joking”. Among many things, he told that he learned to play on a frigideira when he lived in Brazil and had reached so high level of skill that he served as a model for local musicians.

My theory is that it's like a person who speaks French who comes to America. At first they're making all kinds of mistakes, and you can hardly understand them. Then they keep on practicing until they speak rather well, and you find there's a delightful twist to their way of speaking their accent is rather nice, and you love to listen to it.

― Richard Feynman, ”Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!”

As for me, there is a lot of efforts between “all kinds of mistakes” and “love to listen”, but it is such a good synopsis. Working on it!

I was trying to understand how to transliterate my surname properly yesterday. Ministry of Foreign Affairs says it should be written as “Kostianetskii” in English — with double “i” at the end. It's the quite rare combination: “skiing” is the only frequency word that I'm able to remember.

It caused my curiosity and I googled it. The possible reason I came across is funny: cursive writing! Double “i” looks well only on a computer screen but it suddenly turns into “u” when you try to write it on paper.

More details are here.

I have translated Stardew Valley fan manga on a wave of enthusiasm at the end of July (SV is an enormously addictive farmer simulator which went out a couple of years ago).

It was an amusing experience. Firstly, an author of the manga is Chinese and her work was already translated from Chinese to English. I'm not sure what was the bigger problem — cultural differences or language skills, but several frames were a bit difficult to understand what's going on. Secondly, I've figured out that it's a real challenge to pick proper Russian words and not to get something like a quote from an official government's letter in the end.

So, a part of sense had lost during the process, I guess, although I tried to keep everything I could and even had a word with the author in order to solve the most problematic cases. It was quite funny — I don't know Chinese, she doesn't know Russian, so our a bit poor English was the only way to understand each other.

Something could have been translated better, I suppose, and several pictures definitely could have been changed more accurately. But you know what? Hell it out, perfection is a cruel mistress and I like the result yet. Yeah, there is no big deal or something like it — a drawing style is quite common, a plot has no significant differences with the game, but… I don't know. Perhaps, visual novels made a too sentimental son of a bitch out of me :-)

Thanks to Alice for helping me with image processing, Lem for helping me with the translation and Marika for the inspiration. And, sure, thanks to Quantus for the manga.