#bioptic

[PARENTAL ADVISORY]

{explicit:lyrics}

“People also talk about their achievements or previous job experiences here.”

Hello, my name is Radim and these are my adventures.

There is certain character in one of the notorious children’s book. He’s a trustworthy companion to the main protagonist of the book: who is an ant named “Ant”. Our hero goes by name “Bag the bug” and it’s a well known fact that he:

1) Knows very little about a rather lots of things; and

2) Was born and raised in the cinema theatre

Even though he is depicted as a  basically moron of intergalactic proportions, who mostly only boasts of his unbelievable achievements in any given moment, the many adventures and his antsy friend has to deal with would not be possible if he simply wasn't there. The morale of this story is simple: the world needs its clowns.

And this is basically a nicely fitting description of who I am.

But wait, before you go, let me try to at least humour you, shall we?

All my life I’ve been working for one  telecommunication company, starting as the guy in the boroughs of 24/7 interwebz hotline, DPN, ATM, IP and all the things we thought that were here to stay. Over the course of 20+ years I slowly converged from trying to understand console output of the “show ospf” command that does not make sense at all but you simply do not question the Cisco as you are well aware that in the deep space where only Huaweii and Alcatel roams free nobody would even dare to hear your scream. At some point it became abduntantly clear that I was only brought here to suffer – but along came a Perl. And pursuing the knowledge of how things work became my core obsession. Because if “things” work somehow, they can definitely be forced to work better. Harder. I switched to Python before it was cool.

When you need something done, you often have to do it yourself and mostly the only thing you need to do is: to push (your) boundaries hard enough. Knowing the fundamentals of your surrounding environment (i.e.: the people you work with and how things work inside the oversized corporate zaibatsu (observing which is one of my hobby guilty  pleasures nevertheless) for sure helps a lot.

So I try to deliver any kind of an evolution of how we do things. God bless the “agile” project development movement. Huge fan. And it has estimated 60% failure rate as a feature. Some you win, some you lose.

My failure highlights:

— IPTV reporting malfunction, that caused a weeks(!) long state of no-data-delivered-at-all scenario.

— Decommissioning of an internal geo-everything application; utterly unintentional, till the very end. I cry to my atlas every other night.

— CI/CD and VCS mono-repository composition for our internal development.

Even now there is a blood running down from my eyes when I'm trying to read these lines.

Light side of the Moon:

Every of the following wouldn't be possible without our team of beautiful and dedicated people. Martin, Michal, Tomáš and Vendy namely. And my arch–nemesis Aleš deserves credit also.

— Implementation of various new technologies into the realtime data processing inside the ever conservative telco company (being conservative is not a BAD thing, but then again). Logstash, ElasticSearch, Apache NiFi, GitLab on premise, InfluxDB & Grafana, Ansible… we made all these a real thing.

— Thorough delivery IPTV peoplemeter data to a Big Data storages, written mostly from scratch by another of my colleagues. Introducing a by-product of near-realtime Grafana dashboards for broader audience; this was a years later followed by a complete redeployment in form of a Docker microservices utilizing a non-K8s mesh network. The downside of this seemingly good-doing is mentioned above.

— Production deployment of realtime data processing framework (Python) and Docker runtime deployment.

— Delivery of the Apache Kafka messaging bus, built on top of decommissioned hardware, as the punk spirit of distributed software orders us to do.

— Even if it may not seem that way, I do not find any pleasure in achievement taxonomies, but the order was crystal clear: “People also talk about their achievements or previous job experiences here.” Anyway, looking back I have to say I had the time of my life.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I'm glad you asked. I like the automation as a way of being able to survive our increasingly complicated world. Docker was a huge leap forward indeed, but you cannot write the same Compose files over and over: that is if you're not in a need of a mental illness. I kind of enjoy listening to music, so orchestration as a school of doing magic it is.

I really would like to see the dawn of the 5G mobile network first hand – if not for the thrills it will definitely brings us, then from the reason I believe it's the closest you may ever be in real life to the vanilla example of “The Condom Paradox”. Fear not, if you are not already well versed in this paradox, I'll do you a favor and spare your already bruised mind.

That’s pushing the boundaries just enough for me. I also sort of have a soft spot for languages (which may or may be not obvious at this point) and even softer for nice things, so for some 10+ years I helped with production of week’s long second oldest festival in Czech republic, that revolves around Czech language as a tool of  art. That inevitably ended by founding and typesetting a monthly magazine that publishes unpublished translations of foreign books and stuff. All that in flesh, available at your closest bookstore (probably even as we speak). Did my movies, had my translating essays to a woman’s magazine (the one with a shiny cover) episodes. And we are doing an enigmatic site-specific installations with a group of definitely insane people; it's the kind that takes more time to assembly than stays on a display to a kind crowds. That is done yearly and there definitely is a pattern emerging. Thank you for your time, yours truly, Bag the Bug.

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