• (nodebb)

    I don't blame the CTO and team for asking if there's an easier way to implement the reporting, especially if they really didn't have enough knowledge of SQL at the company.

    I blame them for not seeing by a quarter of the way through the rewrite that the answer is no.

  • (nodebb)

    The CTO I know is a lot smarter: they do notice when something isn't working as expected and their hand doesn't shake when it's time to pull the plug on a project. No sunk cost fallacy for that one, just several dead projects totalling thousands of man-hours, born from great ideas that put in practice turned out to be not so good as they looked on paper. IIRC that last one was an integration with Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) which was later renamed Azure Information Protection (AIP) and then was renamed again to Microsoft Purview Information Protection (MPIP). Hitting a moving target is hard so I'm blaming MS for that one. 😆

  • (nodebb) in reply to Dragnslcr

    I blame them for not seeing by a quarter of the way through the rewrite that the answer is no.

    The way I read it, it wasn't that the answer was inherently "no", but rather that the chosen solution path was a very wrong way to do it. (As written, which isn't always indicative of the true underlying sequence of events, they chose what amounts to the worst possible way to address each roadblock/obstacle...)

  • Rob (unregistered)

    So instead of changing views they waste a lot of time and more importantly a lot of money. Not even counting the development costs, there is also runtime overhead with all those Azure services. Microsoft must be really happy about this solution.

  • (nodebb)

    I can't understand what that P. Storm machine is supposed to be doing. the image itself is from (or at least present on) wikimedia, but the page using the media doesn't explain this machine at all. apparently that was common for Storm, who didn't write detailed explanations like Rube Goldberg did.

  • (nodebb)

    In case anybody thinks he's kidding about the song... Google those lyrics. Then watch the video, and the rest of that guy's music videos. And his conference talks; many are very entertaining, in addition to being of course educational. And check out his programming language -- write in it and you can legit claim to be a Rockstar Developer.

  • (nodebb)

    I'm actually surprised that this would fly. That sounds like a really expensive way to attempt to do things "azure-y" and most CTOs start looking at the numbers for what you're paying in Cloud costs at some point. If not the CTO, then someone higher up starts asking questions about why the spend for cloud increased by quite a bit. That does take time in some places, but the questions do start coming eventually and people look for ways to save money.

  • (nodebb)

    I mean - look, I'm not want to be mean or anything, but there's an insane amount of over-engineering going on. The solutions is easily solved on-premise by doing on of two things:

    1. An WebAPI that generates on demand each report in CSV(s) and are returned by the WebAPI using brotli (or gzip).

    2. An WebAPI with a background task periodically generating and caching CSV(s) for reports depending whatever the business requirements are and they are access by a simple request and are returned by the WebAPI using brotli (or gzip).

    And then some sort of Excel-Hacker (aka middle manager) does whatever they want with that data and put it into the corporate design of the day with whatever flavor and manipulation they want to add to make the real data more "presentable".

    Those two things are proven, work reliable and there's no useless busy work work with Hippos demanding redesigns and "adjustments" every second week and everyone will be happy. If the middle manager is too "busy", just replace him with GenAI and prepare for the share holder lawsuits when they sue for being misled. Then hire the middle manager again for half the money of a developer and give the developer a 25% rise. And again everyone is happy in the end.

    Addendum 2026-03-09 13:22: // Edit: I'm aware I didn't mention Azure. I'm after all not a MS sales rep pretending to be a developer and trying to sell an expensive dependency with no practical use.

  • (nodebb)

    void main () { var magic = new EnterprisyAzureFactoryBuilderAntiPatternDataFactoryMakerFactory(this); magic.Go(); }

    You really don't want to see he code for that class....

  • Officer Johnny Holzkopf (unregistered) in reply to paschott

    Do azure sheep (or CTOs with a tendency to needlessly complicate things) dream of CustomerWithoutBirthDate or CustomerWithNoAge?

  • A Human (unregistered) in reply to davearonson 0

    I saw that song before, it's great, but I didn't know that there are more things like it, and conference talk too! I will have to look into this.

  • Tse (unregistered)

    And nobody thought of just exposing the tables and their relationships as an OData API? I know it's ugly and it just moves the query from an SQL string to a more complicated URL string, but it technically achieves the stated goal and is very Microsoft-ey and can be done in Azure...

  • ichbinkeinroboter (unregistered) in reply to davearonson 0

    yeah. Dylan absolutely rocks.

  • Vera (unregistered) in reply to davearonson 0

    Agreed! The song can be found on his youtube channel, v=p03oO_7sCaY.

  • (nodebb)

    I am rather impressed that the CTO didn't manage to somehow include a wooden table and a camera into the mix.

  • Dylan Beattie (github)

    Ha! Getting lyric-checked in The Daily WTF rules :) I wrote that song. (Well, I wrote the words. The music is obviously not mine.) And others. They're all at https://dylanbeattie.net/music/ if you want to check them out.

    (Can I post links here? I have no idea. I'm guessing not 'cos nobody else has. I'm going to try. If it doesn't work, maybe I can delete this post. If it doesn't work, and I can't delete the post, I'll just leave it here for all time as a sort of digital memorial of the time Dylan Tried To Post A Link)

    Addendum 2026-03-11 06:26: (so links don't work, and you can't edit or delete posts, but the edit button does let you add an "Addendum". See?)

  • (nodebb) in reply to Dylan Beattie

    Your lyrics are both accurate and inspired, but the comments on the YT page are so spot-on they're giving me PTSD.

  • TrueWill (unregistered) in reply to Dylan Beattie

    Your music is inspired. There goes my productivity for the afternoon....

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