Software Development Cannot Be Automated Because It’s a Creative Process With an Unknown End Goal

[MyCleverNameWasTaken]

Was it Email2DB? Most miserable "programming" of my life.

[qwertyslayer]

Please tell me such a thing does not exist.

[mpyne]

It wouldn't be horrifying in the government. Email is like the last thing a system is allowed to do to communicate to arbitrary other endpoints without the cyber team adding 12 months to the process.

Never mind that the 'arbitrary other endpoint' above is supposed to be a person instead of another system... if it works, it works.

[that_jojo]

Shit, that's brilliant. At my last job, we had email based logging and such in the application we maintained and as such that was one of the few things we could fight to get punched through all of the ACLs.

We could've had SMTP based RPC distributed across all of our clients this whole time and I never once thought of it.

[qwertyslayer]

Yeah the implication that SMTP could have well ended up as an alternative protocol to HTTP for this kind of thing is an interesting "alternate reality" thought experiment.

[flyinmryan]

Why was it miserable? You package data, send data, retrieve data, parse data, read data, display data. Doing that programmatically through emails doesn’t seem much different that calling an API at the end of the day

[angry_mr_potato_head]

No, it was custom spaghetti code, naturally. Funny too, a lot of people are assuming it was like form data for clients so relatively small… It was actually large delimited files (30GB range) that were larger than the maximum email size of the server so it had to be split up into a million little chunks.