Posted in : Tech

Dev confused about how to implement his API :

Jul 01 2014

Religion is so far better than computing. If only we had some kind of prophet too, at least we would know what to do in advance. Seriously.

— Today at work. In the end, we decided to go for it and refactor later šŸ˜€

Job inquiry : software prophet.

Posted in Notes, Devsworld, Quotes

Dude, where’s your paranoia?

Working with Java bears

Posted on April 30, 2014 by eloone

Today’s story is about security. At work, one of our big construction site is to move old SOAP webservices into modern RESTful webservices. One of these webservices’ job is to generate a personalized pdf for a user based on the id of their banking operation. Doing this was not trivial considering our architecture, but it was rather fun, and it came with extra fun because developers are left alone with themselves to decide how to do things with no site manager to supervise how the building is going to be. No plan, just build it. Developers are expected to be their own architects. So developers are also expected to communicate with each other on how they’re going to do things. Sometimes it leads to funny situations.

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Posted in Stories, Devsworld

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You can’t be just geek, you know

The sentient developer mode

Posted on April 17, 2014 by eloone

So today I had an interesting conversation at work. They filled me in about a new position they want to open for a front engineer and they would like me to take the role. Obviously the job interests me, but it interests me only for its technical appeal because it’s an architect job – and this is what I want to do. They were pretty confident for the technical part of the job and didn’t even mention it which was reassuring. However, their biggest concern was if I would be motivated enough to learn more about the actual activity of the company in order to create interfaces with all the business logic in mind. In other words I would need to have a pretty sharp knowledge of the business logic to do the job, I would need to interact with non technical teams and such, they said “We want the closest person to the application to know our business the best” – wow. This is new.

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Posted in Life, Devsworld

Why don’t tech people give a full answer?

The hostile tech person always comes in peace

Posted on November 14, 2013 by eloone

Today I had the impression I was hostile with one of my non-tech co-worker. He asked me something, and instead of giving him a full well-formed answer I redirected him to reading his emails. It’s only later that I realized what I had done because he seemed a bit pissed about it.

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Posted in Devsworld

Nov 14 2013

At 6:20pm today as I was leaving work, one foot already outside, the guy in front of my desk calls me :

Him : Elodie?
Me : Yes….?….
Him : Do you know regexes well?
Me : (aaAAH the horror! Time to run or what ?)
No, I leave. Yes, I might sleep there.
555ms left to answer…
Him : ?
Me : Hmmm…I’m ok. (Wrong answer, I knew it, I knew it!)…Why?
Him : I really don’t get this one. It seems like it’s replacing all the “n” by spaces.
I went to look. The regex looked like this : str.replace('/n/g', ' ');

Oh my goodness, than you I can run home ! šŸ˜€

Posted in Notes, Devsworld, Chats

Rings, bells and victory

A debugging story Ep02

Posted on October 30, 2013 by eloone

This is the story of my investigation on solving a cryptic bug that caused a very mysterious session reset. It involves, https, cookie privacy (httponly, secure), understanding of sessions, understanding of the infrastructure, team work and the obsessive need to understand why, why and why. Continue reading →

In this episode I will require you to keep your eyes and sockets open. Follow me !

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Posted in Stories, Devsworld

Tagged , , , , ,

@deezer

Sep 11 2013

I just come back from a meetup at Deezer HQ this time. Deezer, you know, the online music service. And on our way out we were waiting for another dev as he went to the toilets. And when he got out here is what he said :

Dev n.1 (poet): Guys, you know what. I think the water tap in the washroom works just like the Deezer player. I pushed it and then, it was like…loading the water.
Dev n.2: That’s because you didn’t use the water tap Premium.
Dev n.3 (me): LOL.

It’s so insane but so poetic at the same time, isn’t it? I never get tired of discussing with developers especially after two beers, when the darkest secrets of software development are unleashed (so many stories to be told here). Tech meetups are becoming part of my survival routine to get a sign from the universe that I am not alone : there are “others” like me !!

Posted in Notes, Life, Devsworld, Chats

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Kate Harff hates the machine

about:kate ā™„

Posted on August 21, 2013 by eloone

This is one of the discoveries of my summer : “about:kate“. It’s a German tv series about a young woman who gets herself in a psychiatric hospital to cure her depression and her only portal to the real world is through the Internet and Facebook. No, wait! Where are you going?! It’s not as bad as it sounds !

Kate Harff

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Posted in Discoveries, Machines are digging, Videos

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A day on the grill

A debugging story Ep01

Posted on July 10, 2013 by eloone

Today we had a big deal production release. And guess what, everyone is on holiday ! Happy summer everyone !!!

The release was at 2 pm, and everything on my part was already tested and validated up until our staging environment, the step before production where everything is supposed to be strictly equal to the production environment (according to the great theory of perfect software development). But around 2:30 pm, I got a phone call, an email, an instant message, AND a visit in person, simultaneously, to tell me the same thing : “THE SERVER IS BLEEDING !!! THE WEBSITE IS DYING, DON’T YOU SEE !!! LET’S ALL PANIC TOGETHER, JOIN US – NOW.”

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Posted in Life, Stories, Devsworld

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Therapy by Software

Posted on April 28, 2013 by eloone

How to ping a url ?

$ ./ping_url

That’s how my cure started.

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Posted in Inspiration, Observations, Technology saves me

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