A different kind of (event) backbone
I’ve been discouraged lately. Not a little discouraged, but a LOT discouraged by what’s coming out of the software industry.
It’s not inherently political, but it is economic: in a world where constant growth is the demand, businesses feel the need to justify fat payrolls and ever increasing headcount to investors who don’t understand much about the underlying work. It’s gotten so bad that I believe the software industry and actual good software are literally opposed in the present. If a service contract is how you make most of your money, who gives a shit if the software sucks: it just means that more customers are willing to pay for the service component. And what are the customers gonna do, go to the other guy? They’re playing by the exact same rules!
Because modern software is so opaque to most users (and many “developers” too, at this point :eye-roll), and 100% opaque to the administrators and business school graduates doing the purchasing, we’re getting fewer and fewer acceptable alternatives. Everyone just defaults to the “enterprise” solutions, whether that’s an appropriate choice or not. In house IT has become uninformed as to what they’re deploying, simply following the playbook handed down by their masters (I don’t use that word lightly.) Don’t think, just follow the instructions and no one can hold anyone accountable.
If the news is any evidence: corporations and companies are not doing their jobs when it comes to writing, maintaining, deploying, good software. Security is a nightmare. Daily breaches compromise millions of credentials, PII, deeply personal data like photos, emails, etc. What the actual f*** are our organizations paying for with that “carefully negotiated enterprise contract” if this is the best we can do?
Well: it’s not the best we can do. Upton Sinclair put it so concisely when he said:
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”
and I think we’re watching that unfold on an unparalleled timescale. Brian Krebs recently remarked on the same idea regarding the literal computer security industry.
I am blessed (cursed) with the ability to write code. A lot of it. I used to enjoy it, but now it just feels like a necessity to get anything done in an era where dumb dumb idiots are steering the actively sinking ship taking us all down with it, toasting their success while the rest of us desperately attempt to punch the nuclear launch codes into our Duo for the tenth time today because someone thought a one-hour hard logout was a good idea and makes us safer. In a different world, that kind of thing is actively malicious.
We’ve been working on an event pipeline/backbone. Something that real people could use and deploy. Strip out the deployment configuration, make it required secure, and make it fast and easy to get up and running eliminating as much room for error as possible. It’s also ephemeral (if needed) so teardown and cleanup need not be a concern, absent the storage use-case. The idea is so simple (really just a data model underneath a human-readable amount of code) that I’ll declare it is probably not even close to patentable.
We’re going to follow the SQLite licensing model and put it into the public domain. It’d be nice to eventually see something come of it eventually, but for now it’s just trying to be a whiff a sanity in a world that seems to have no vision or plan anymore, other than to take as much money as possible, as fast as possible, from anyone and everyone.
There are still a few of us out there who can’t handle that. I can’t keep watching the state of things go the way they are. Young, talented software developers are literally coming to me scared that there’s no career path for them to not have to go build something actively evil just to enjoy a little comfort and security in their own life (which everyone deserves.)
… Jesus Christ. What have we done?
2025-07-04 06:49