It was 2021. Spring pollen competed with birdsong to fill the air. Sneezes abounded. We needed to relocate my mom, but were having a rough go of it. Finding the cash to finance a move and purchase a dwelling of some kind was proving elusive.
I took an inventory of my skills:
Skill Level Construction (houses) Basic Software development High Musical talent Mediocre Busking at the waterfront on the weekends might pull in a few hundred a month — more if they pay me to stop.
All but the most trivial code needs some configuration and setup to do meaningful work. From database connection strings to IoC container initialization — even the lowly idempotent Hello World app is dependent on the implicit default configuration of its environment.
In the physical world, we like instrument clusters, dashboards, things that bring together all the buttons, switches, dials, and toggles into one convenient place. Configuring our code should be no different. Wouldn’t it be nice if managing all the config things were as easy as driving your car?
Well, meet your new friend, Dicese Slex, (Dih-CHESS-ee Slex, for the uninitiated). He’s a cool don wearing silk system threads, and he’s here to spruce up your configs. At the very least, he hopes to get you thinking about the importance of code configs.
I saw a tweet the other day that said, “the scariest thing about COVID-19 is that it looks like a JIRA ticket.” That is scary!
Gets you thinking though: What if COVID-19 were a JIRA ticket for a software bug? Can we unearth a lesson or two about how to prevent bugs from sneaking into our haloed code repositories and affecting our users?
Can your product’s “killer feature” — that amazing bit of utility that sets it apart from the competition — actually drive customers away from your product? Consider one example.
Eight words.
“Hey, can I see you in my office?”
Whatever important tasks hung spinning in the air around you darken to match your widening pupils, then plummet to the floor in a slow-motion Broadway disaster. Eight words and the serene, ever-smiling avatar of your boss.
Prologue: Merek vs the Old Library The last tattered shred of hope clung limply to its flagpole and flew at half mast.
“Where did we go wrong?”, Merek grimaced. Hopes in Köd Kingdom had flown so high, higher than the green and black banners billowing proudly atop the castle spires. The day they’d broken ground— the popping corks and howling cheers still echoed mirthfully down his ear canals. Only the wind howled now.