Remember when gas was cheap because the entire country ground to a halt due to Trump mismanaging COVID? Those sure were the days…

Relevant https://youtu.be/ymlqxjTA3Uo

Q3 2026 will come around and the AI will report that revenues are down. The CEO will respond the only way they know, by ordering that costs be cut by laying off employees. The AI will report there is no one left to lay off but the CEO.

Fade to black and credits roll.

Biden had a bad debate: faces calls to withdraw from the race.

Trump convicted of 34 felonies: record fund raising.

Maybe this makes me old, but I much prefer a written document explaining how an API works over Swagger.

Same. Especially since I’ve been building EDWs for most of my career. People are always surprised that it actually takes time to integrate with different systems.

“What do you mean you can’t just pull all the data out of this system that we don’t have database access to and are still building out the APIs?”

I kid… The people asking for stuff don’t know what backend databases and APIs are.

That would have been fine for me too. I don’t own the API, so I can only speak from a consumer perspective in saying: I don’t want a HTTP 200 if my request didn’t succeed.

I got pulled into a meeting with a team from AWS. I was told they were looking to implement a new solution, so I had to explain in detail how our data lake and data warehouse solution worked. I showed them how we pull data from all these different sources, how we have different integration patterns, etc.

At the end of my presentation, I asked “does that give you what you guys need? Or do I need to go into any more detail about anything specific? I don’t know what you all are actually building, so I’d be happy to provide more detail where you need it.”

Their response was “yeah that was all great info. We’re looking to build an app using AI and ML that allows you to run the business with a click of a button.”

I’m glad it was a remote meeting without cameras, because I literally face palmed. They didn’t have an actual use case or problem they were trying to solve. They were literally just selling a solution built on AI and ML. They didn’t know what it was gonna do, but by God they were committed to selling it.

The problem I ran into was the response returned a JSON body, but then had an “error” attribute that was returned in it that had the error details. So we were parsing the JSON and loading elements into our database. We were hitting the API passing in a datetime of when the last success job was run, so basically saying “give me everything that’s changed since I last called you.”

So yeah, eventually we noticed we were missing small chunks of data. It turned out that every time the API errored out, we’d get a valid JSON response that contained the error message, but it didn’t have the attributes we were looking for. So didn’t load anything, but updated our timestamp to say when our last successful call was.

Huge pain in the ass to troubleshoot, because the missing data was scattered with no distinguiable pattern.

Prego

From my experience, they speak mostly with their hands

This legitimately happened to me a few months ago. A vendor API was returning HTTP 200 with the error details embedded in the JSON response. It was a pain in the ass to troubleshoot.

Yeah I’m confused as to why that sentence was in the announcement.

I have the same problem with XML too. Notepad++ has a plugin that can format a 50MB XML file in a few seconds. But my current client won’t allow plugins installed. So I have to use VS Code, which chokes on anything bigger than what I could do myself manually if I was determined.

Also not advocating for murder, but that would be some chef’s kiss level of irony.

The secret to a healthy career in IT is to let things break just a little every once in a while. Nothing so bad as to cause serious problems. But just enough to remind people that you exist and their world would come crumbling down without you.

“Let’s fucking go!”

Lmao I love how he just gets more and more flabbergasted throughout the whole video. Truly an accurate depiction of dealing with timezones (which I’m unfortunately dealing with right now!)

Ooooooo that’s good

I had a list of 30 items I had to prioritize with clients the other day. We ended up with about two dozen Priority 1s and the rest were 2s.

So I had to go back and say, “let’s prioritize the 1s” and at least got them to agree to 1.A, 1.B, and 1.C.