What's the dumbest thing you've shipped?
18 month project is winding down. I suspect it will have 1 use in the next 4 years we are supporting it.
The tool is basically a copy of the S3 browser, only shittier. The license for the S3 browser is only 20 bucks btw.
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The German government has decided that starting on October 1st of this year, they don't want energy providers who want to call up another energy provider to just google the other company and use that number. They want an entire new system of message exchange for the sake of transmitting data like a company's address and phone number directly to all it's market buddies.
I'm part of the team who had to build that shit within the last 4 months or so. It's a neat project and everyone gained knowledge in AWS cloud stuff, but realistically, every one of our customers will use the system exactly once (as required by the government) and then never again.
Could it be used as the basis for more advanced information exchange among those companies?
They already have a very advanced system to transfer actually valuable data (when/how much power needs to go to the grid, end user data, redispatch of solar panels etc etc). We've actually taken that complex and valid system and clipped its wings to do something way less useful :')
that's .. way too pragmatic for a government project
I'm in that boat now 😭
Except I built the app from the ground up and I was super proud of it. I learned so much about PKI and S3 and made a better system for our suppliers, engineers, and customers.
The fatal flaw was that changing supplier workflows was a complete non starter. It didn't matter that I reduced the complexity of supplier involvement and made it easier for them to work with us, the old supplier portal HAD to be their front end, which has no api to interact with (one of the drivers for this project).
Without the direct supplier pipeline, the tool is worse than useless. Now we need a manual process to receive, validate, and sign software before moving it to the new system. Then to deliver it requires another manual process in reverse.
I made everyone involved life worse.
Germans and over engineered solutions, most iconic duo!
Not in IT, unfortunately. I work a lot in public projects and the underlying problem is pretty much always politics, not technology.
One project is very simple, in theory. You authorize yourself with BundID, type in some data, these are used to query one agency, you add some more data and then it's sent to another agency. In a sane world, that would mean 5 parties involved. However, we are currently at 10, just for one of the 16 states. Hardly any of that is a technical necessity, it's just political will and incompetence.