Retail fail, Integration, Docs, Testing, Digital Distribution, GAE, ScyllaDB, C-Lion, ESB, PY 3.5

Post date: Sep 29, 2015 4:45:50 PM

• Once again sad story how badly customer service can fail, if basic information systems aren't up to date. Friend of mine bought a new sofa, received a notification that it has arrived at the pick-up point. We picked up a rental car to pick it up and when we there it seemed to take quite a long time to get it. After about 45 minutes of waiting guy came out and told that there has been a mistake, yes, our system shows it's here, and we called you to pick it up. But it's not actually here. Just great. How about getting the systems and users to work so people could get reliable information? I know I know, fails like these are business as usual, but shouldn't be. It's really crappy service. They didn't even promise a free delivery due to this fail, even if I would have personally required it.
• My personal favorite when doing integration project is absolutely amazing amount of conflicting documentation which still lacks the key information. It's just awesome to read 1200 pages of documentation and find out that it didn't contain the information required. All the required information could have been in many cases packed just on a few pages. I just love 'documentation department' which produces large number of extensive documentation which is all just big waste of time.
• Seriously tuned with a few dev and stating environments to make everything work perfectly. It's really important to refine processes and make sure everything works before deploying into production.
• Read short article how BBC handles their global data, video & news delivery aka Digital Distribution. - No news there, it's all the basic stuff and business as usual.
• Some of my old Google App Engine projects got shut down due to Master - Slave Data Store deprecation and shutdown, because I didn't have interest to migrate those to use High Replication Data Store. Also one of the reasons why I don't like App Engine right now, is the lack of Python 3 support.
• Quickly checked out ScyllaDB (Scylla Database) which is a drop in replacement fro Cassandra. It looks awesome. No I didn't have time to test it. I liked their architecture. - I think Google guys said it a long time ago, when people complained about problems and complexities of multi-threading and manycore software development. What? It's like having multiple single core computers with really great interconnect. What's the problem?
• More news about C-Lion (Sea Lion?) Cinia's new submarine optic fiber to Central Europe and TeliaSonera's new data center in Pitäjänmäki, Helsinki, Finland, EU. Actually the data center is about 100 meters from where I'm working. I've got a great photo series, because I snap a photo or two daily when passing it.
• Suomi.fi-palveluväylän kuvaukset. Finish Service Channel description (in Finnish). - KW: X-Road, Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), systems integration.
• Python 3.5.0 release notes in detail including new PEPs. List: zip, **{'unpack':'me'}, %bytes, @ matrix multiplication, os.scandir() I also love os.walk() which is old feature, also math.isclose() is very handy. I've often written horrible kludges to workaround very small differences with float values which aren't same, but basically are same. Also getting rid of pyo files is really nice. But the most awesome feature is support for coroutines (PEP-0492) and await syntax. I could write a whole post about awesomeness. Gotta write some play code to find out how to use this stuff in detail. I've been using managers and thread / process pools in most of projects. And in some cases individual threads / task, but this should be so much better and more efficient. Also see: AsyncIO.