Notes: Meanwhile

In Japanese, there's a wonderful word: ikigai. It's kind of like your reason for living, but not in some huge existential sense — more in a grounded, everyday way. A source of inner energy, a source of joy. Basically, the thing that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.

A person can have several of those anchors, and they're different for everyone. Coffee, a cat, a craft you love, taking care of the people close to you, a garden, walks, video games...

Anyway, that's what got me thinking. I stumbled across a channel called "Alyoshkino Svoe". From what I understand, the guy behind it is a lawyer from St. Petersburg who breeds fancy chickens and regularly posts videos about specific breeds, incubation details, feeding, and so on.

I'm not into birds at all, but I caught myself just sitting there for twenty minutes, completely mesmerized, listening without looking away. It almost works like therapy, honestly. And it struck me that this is actually a pretty solid kind of ikigai: something you'll love the way this guy loves his chickens.

I'm out for a walk in the evening, and behind me there's some mom and her little kid — about five years old, I guess. I don't see them, I just hear them talking. The mom is explaining university to the kid: that you have to get in, study, there will be exams and all that.

The boy is quiet for a bit, then says sadly:

— I thought there was only school, but it turns out there are more difficulties too...

The white things in the background are called chichilaki. It’s a kind of Georgian New Year tree (in practice, it’s finely shaved hazelnut branches). It’s believed to absorb all the accumulated negativity, so after the holidays, it’s supposed to be burned (along with the negativity).

Turns out, that last part is a bit of a challenge. The local police (and especially the fire department) view this good old tradition with suspicion — and understandably so (a chichilaki can be as tall as a person, making it quite the torch). So, we were advised to simply toss the "negativity-charged" chichilaki into the trash to avoid getting fresh troubles. Or donate it to the zoo — apparently, the animals play with them and even use them to clean their teeth.

That last part made me smile. Getting rid of negativity with the help of cats — what a surprise. Big, toothy cats, sure, but still cats!

A knock at the door. I open it, and there are two bright, twenty-something girls standing there. Flashing huge smiles at me, they start talking a mile a minute.

The Georgian language is beautiful, but I haven’t gotten around to learning it yet. I sigh and suggest we switch to English or Russian.

The girls frown a little. Then one of them digs into her bag, pulls out a flyer, points to it, gives me a thumbs up like, “cool stuff!” — and hands it to me.

Then they laugh and run off.

Take that, language barrier!

Amidst all these pet projects and the August whirlwind, I forgot to mention that I completed a course on system analysis, which I recently wrote about.

The course was structured so that throughout the sessions, we worked on the same system, identifying problems and gradually solving them. Before the first lesson, we were asked to design the initial version of the system so that we could compare it with the final version at the end of the course and assess our progress. Well, I’m happy with the comparison — I mean, it’s really hard to look at that first version without laughing (or crying) :)

There wasn’t much time for reflection during the course, so I plan to continue working on the materials and turning the lessons into personal notes. It’s not that simple, given that our company deals heavily with solutions based on 1C:Enterprise, and much of my work involves various integrations of 1C instances with solutions outside the 1C stack.

However, 1C instances can be considered as monoliths with a specific set of characteristics (depending on the tasks being solved within them), and in most other respects, communication with them doesn’t differ much from traditional solutions: the same events (like RabbitMQ), the same incoming/outgoing HTTP calls, the same instability metric, and so on.

At this point, I’m definitely adopting (or have already adopted):

1. Breaking down the technical specifications into numbered items (US-XXX) and storing them in one place with tags like "updated at," "canceled at," etc. This format seems quite effective.
2. Maintaining an ADR (Architecture Decision Record). I’ve already implemented this, actually. However, it’s a bit concerning that some items occasionally get stored there that aren’t strictly architectural (e.g., logging principles for certain sections). Still, such things seem crucial for decision-making.
3. Event Storming as a way to visualize business processes. I can’t say it’s a huge improvement over the patchwork we used before, but the result looks nice, and having a standard is better than having none.
4. Application service diagrams with stickers indicating each service's characteristics. This is quite functional when you need to look at the project from a high level, and it’s not as dry as endless tables. That way, if the bus factor kicks in, the next person is more likely to notice these details.
5. I want to work on BPMN and Activity Diagrams. I like the format, but so far, my attempts haven’t been satisfactory. I’ll keep trying.
6. The concept of separating functionality to reduce dependencies unexpectedly resonated with me. It used to seem simpler to combine similar functionalities to reduce code volume, but now it seems this approach increases complexity and internal cohesion, potentially causing more harm than good.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with the course. It seems like the best investment of effort over the past year. If you’re thinking of taking it but are unsure — go for it :)

I accidentally remembered that six months ago, one of my colleagues threw a link to Yaga into the work chat. It is a future (I guess) competitor of JIRA in Russia. Judging by the URL, the guys from Rostelecom are developing it. Here my curiosity was awakened — how is it there, did it take off?

Alas, but looks like nope. At least, the landing page has the “leave a request and wait for a response beep” vibe. Only a simplified version is available for smaller teams that I can't touch as well: being not in Russia and clicking on the “Start using” button leads me to a ban. Welp, next time, maybe.

The naming is clickbait, of course. But I’m not sure if it’s really a good choice. For example, “1C” may provoke forced jokes (One s! Odin's ass! Haha), but if you google this, you are more likely to find information about the platform or at least the vendor. Not a bunch of articles, fan fiction, fan art, or video games, as in the case of Yaga.

Moreover, some wrong associations come to mind. What does Baba Yaga reminds you of? A hut on chicken legs? It looks like an initially poorly designed application that was somehow remade right on production. A mortar? A crutch? Damn, if you look at it from the point of view of programmers — these are not red flags, but real scarlet banners fluttering in the wind :)

One more thing: I'm probably spoiled, but when I hear the word “Yaga”, the first thing that pops into my head is not a powerful witch from Slavic folklore, but disgusting booze from the 2000s.

Now Baba with Yaga are no longer redneck, but a patriotic programmer!

― colleague

Recently, I took a system analysis course, which was taught by the guys from the “School of Strong Programmers”. I have two goals:

1. First, I need to calibrate. I handle a dozen tech stacks that have different tool sets and concepts of beauty. This, of course, is a great development, but it distorts the perspective: I am drawn to solve the next problem, starting with minor technical things, simply because I am good at it. Meanwhile, if you look at the problem a little from above, think about it, and draw some diagrams, you will get a better or at least more meaningful solution. So I want to convince myself to do this more often.
2. Secondly, I need to learn how to write clear documentation for developers. In practice, I rarely get around to it, and when I do, I don’t have time to keep it up-to-date. In short, time is short, and I would at least like to do the paperwork somehow so that the reader grasps the idea more quickly.

The course itself is made in the shape of iterations: every week you are told about the same project that the main character of the story, Ibrahim, is trying to design (that’s him on the landing page in the link above). Every week, there are more and more problems with this project, and the solutions that dude comes up with become more and more intricate.

In addition, students are regularly assigned homework for another project with similar issues. It needs to be analyzed and designed again and again, taking into account the new knowledge and limitations gained over the past week.

So far, it's going great. The main concern is a lack of time. I read relatively slowly and try to take notes on the most captivating or simply difficult passages. Meanwhile, there is a lot of material in the course, and all of it is interesting, even if you count only the main part of the content.

In addition, if you go to the additional links, you can even take away the saints. It takes six months, no less. I tried to read them at least diagonally, but it turned out to be a damn bad idea. I ended up seeing the main character of the course in a street advertisement :)

Recently, we came up with the idea of dividing the internal ERP into several independent parts and organizing data exchange between them. We discussed the outlines of the task, the exchange model, transport, and roughly agreed on deadlines — in general, we did what we usually do.

I created a task for the stuff. We give them names in English, so I wrote in the first wording that came to mind.

The title came out with sound. Okay, this one is funny, but what should I call it then? Well, let it be Distributed Internal ERP. Abbreviated... DIE?

I let the first one be. Long live Papa Roach :)

I was wasting time at the supermarket checkout: it’s evening, there aren’t many customers anymore, but the elderly cashier is clearly tired and isn’t in too much of a hurry. Standing in front a tall, gray-haired man with a luxurious beard whiles away the time studying the rack of chocolates next to the cash register.

Finally, he takes a Snickers, twirls it in his hands thoughtfully. Then he pushes two more towards himself and, broadly, with visible pleasure, smiles into his mustache :)

Making a password recover function via SMS for our customer portal. Got to the Twilio documentation related to alphanumeric sender ID support in different countries; this feature allows you to send messages so that the recipient sees not the sender's number but something meaningful (a company name, for example).

The feature is regulated differently everywhere: in some countries it just works, but in others registration is possible or even required.

Well, let's take a look:

🤔

• Portugal: yes
• Puerto Rico: no
• Qatar: yes (with registration)
• Reunion: yes
• Romania: yes (with registration) (but be afraid of Dracula)

I don’t know how else I can explain this cemetery.

UPD: Found the answer. Grave crosses mean you have to pay $700 to register.

To be frank, I like the explanation about Dracula much more.

I like to notice things in the world around me that clearly have a story behind them. In video games, this is called “environmental storytelling”: they don’t tell you the story directly, but if you look around, you can guess which gun was hanging on the wall and who fired from it.

For example, I recently celebrated the company's 10th anniversary with colleagues at a local golf club. Balls had to be sent flying from the second floor; there are no railings for obvious reasons, but a net is stretched in case someone loses their balance.

Why are you talking about this, you ask? Well, there are warnings on the walls: jump into the net of your own free will and pay ten thousand dirhams. Recording this heroic leap of faith on camera is fine as well, just prepare five thousand more.

Do you feel the smell of a good history?

Another example: once flew to Turkey to rest and decided, just in case, to look through the rules of the airline (what can be taken on board, what can not). Among the list of items prohibited from being carried on board, I found “steel spear” and “steel flail” 😬

UPD: Another great example from somewhere on the Internet.

For the last month I have been rewriting standard data exchange between FirstBit ERP and Bitrix for a client task. Co-workers doing the same on the Bitrix side prepared a huge mapping for this case: which field on the 1C side should be transferred to which Bitrix field (and vice versa).

They published this mapping as Google Docs tables, in the interface of which you can see users using any document at this moment — both logged in and anonymous. Anonymous ones traditionally are displaying as animals.

Colleagues generally prefer to work anonymously. As a result, I definetely used to feel like a Disney princess: you start working in the morning, and anonymous quokkas, penguins and chinchillas roll out from everywhere :-)

Slack, of course, is a thing to scold. For being slow, for having bugs, for notifications. However, I just love his stubs in case there are no new messages.

Look at this cuteness:

Why do we need psychotherapists at all?

Or this:

Geez-Louise, Slack, hold on. You're not the first who advices this, believe me.

Someone told me about the Croatian comic strips NOT/BUT at the beginning of last year, when I was seriously learning to draw. Each strip there is about some kind of traumatic or simply gloomy thought that comes into the artist’s head while working. The idea is to push a reader in the right direction and give them a more practical perspective on the situation they're in.

I quit drawing a year later, at the end of February: it became clear that I no longer had time for a hobby. But comics are completely universal; look through, even if you have no idea what a kneaded eraser is :-)

All these endless soul-searching are well known to any professional, and the way out of them is not always obvious. Especially if you are angry, tired, and the deadline for the project expired somewhere last week.

Yesterday morning, I was buying gifts for my women. While a florist was makings bouquets for me, we had a small talk and I suddenly caught her eye. She was looking at the growing crowd of customers with calmness and a clearly readable shadow of doom. This is probably how sailors looking at a surging wave which is about to bury their boat :-)

People outside the flower industry grin sometimes — they say, eight of March is such a magical holiday for all the florists who make a fortune in ten hours. Well, income is really good these days, but literally anybody who has ever worked in this sphere more often associates the holiday (and a couple of days before it, by the way) with a monstrous strain on health and nerves.

I can say that I got off cheaply: was just deploying and servicing some IT of a local net of flower shops, nothing more (by the way, I want to proudly recommend my former colleagues!). Nonetheless, the smell of flowers caused me Vietnam syndrome for a long time :-)

There is a good note from Maxim Ilyahov about a way of analyzing something which doesn't concern you but annoys you anyway. It's reminded me of an American principle of non-judgemental attitude which I read about a couple of years ago. As for me, it uses different words to make the same point.

By the way, this principle presents in Russia too — there is even a famous adage “don't be judgemental so you won't be judged”. What a pity for us that it isn't so widespread yet.

The artist is Adam Ellis.

As for me, it's a great illustration for an everlasting moan “why do you always stare at your smartphone blah blah blah”. A reason is quite simple: people have their friends, books, podcasts, games, and YouTube in their smartphones. It's much more fun than a frowning man or a grim women with guru syndrome next to them, for example.

The same is true of children. Social networks are full of arguments about it, but a reason is still the same: if a teenager flips through pictures in his phone in front of you, you bore him and a problem obviously is you.