It’s Amazing How Much Work a System Can Take
Today has been nothing more than one little task after another. A million cuts. Nothing that hard - assuming you know this particular system, but it's amazing that there's nothing in this multi-million dollar system that allows you to "update" it's components en masse. There are some tools, but as evidenced by what I've done today, they aren't very good, and everything has to be verified to see if it actually worked. That's no way to work.
Then there's the tech support... virtually non-existant, and when they do try to help, you're lucky if they answer the question. OK, they have the easy ones covered, but those, by definition, aren't what you need help with. The hard ones like how are messages passed in this single-threaded model of yours? or I can see the data in the GUI client, but how can I get at it programmatically? - those, well... I've found that it's important to ask, only to have a written record of them not answering. In the end, you have to figure it out.
But what has struck me today is the mountains of work that this system - so very close to production status, is taking. It was supposed to make things easier... reduce the staffing requirements... eliminate systems... but it's having the complete opposite effect. New processes and applications are being built to interface it to systems it's not replacing. The number of people keeping it going make me think of the building of the great pyramids of Egypt... thousands of people toiling for their entire lives to build something one person is going to use. Kinda sad, in a way.
So today has been that kind of day that we move bricks. Nothing impossible, just lots of little bricks.