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Could you further elaborate on “intellectual engineers”? What mistakes were made? Esoteric languages? Obfuscating design patterns?

Partially so I could learn from mistakes and partially since I’m a sucker for post-mortems :)

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There is a part of the app that extracts and parses a database log. There is C, Java, Perl, Go, and bash scripts all over the repo. The bootstrapper is written in Java, but the core work is done in Go. Commandline arguments that are documented in comments may or may not even work. The Go section is one big state machine.

That's just to take a database log, put it into JSON, and zip it up.

That all for just one step in the data pipeline. The others are slightly less hairy, but 75% of this pipeline is literally just moving data around. It goes from JSON to MySQL to Postgres to Parquet. There is no data enrichment at all during these steps. It literally just unpacks from one format, packs to another and repeat.

The whole fucking thing is just one big masturbation circlejerk for a bunch of engineers that have thankfully been RIFed/forced out...

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