Island (from the series “Kukaryamba”)

We have shared joys and sorrows since we met.

You are like an island in the open sea, generously gifted to me by fate.

Every office has its own little island. Kukaryamba had one, too, and it was called “Sakhalin”. It was run by the all-powerful Filya, who was a huge, shaggy man in a torn sweater and an unkempt beard, exactly the kind of person programmers were imagined to be in those days – people who had some connection with office equipment.

Filya was one of the first to appear in Kukaryamba, was almost the first developer and for a long time he performed all the functions that no one does manually these days, namely: he controlled versions, ran unit tests, built test assemblies, performed static code analysis, did code reviews and much more. As the main one, developers sent him their changes in the form of zips, and he single-handedly decided what to do with these changes. Sometimes Filya looked at the changes sent to him and was satisfied, answering with a short “sounds gut”, sometimes he returned them with the resolution: “Disgusting, rewrite!”

For a while, everything was great, builds were made, versions were posted and everyone, including our KuKarya-management, were happy. Thus, our product was born from the sea foam, the main part of which was the library for rendering the cartographic content “Sakhalin”.

Filya was the full and sole, as they would say now, “owner” of “Sakhalin”. He did not let strangers into his garden, since “Sakhalin” was a rather complex and intricate creature, with many macros, assembler inserts and self-generating “devils”. To assess the degree of “Sakhalin's” detachment from the rest of the world, it is worth noting that it was assembled only on Filya's machine. Also, according to rumors, it contained Tetris somewhere in its depths, running directly on the video card, but Filya remained mysteriously silent to all inquiries, neither confirming nor denying the rumors.

And everything would have been fine if Filya hadn't left for America one day. I even remember that cloudy day, it was Wednesday, there was a nasty St. Petersburg rain. Filya came in the morning and said from the doorway:

– Enough, little ones, the dancing is over!

– What's wrong? – we didn't understand.

– I'm leaving, gentlemen!

– Where?

— To America, where else?

And Filya left. But “Sakhalin” remained.

For almost a year no one had touched him, he was quietly gathering on the computer abandoned by Filya, which was now in the office of the head of development, overloading which was strictly forbidden.

Gradually, everyone somehow began to forget about the existence of “Sakhalin”, since it did not require the addition of new features, and was included in all versions of products, just as Filya left it.

But a year and a half later, one international organization announced a new version of the standard, which required a significant change in the drawing logic.

Remembering Sakhalin, the management offered Phil a part-time job in America, but, according to rumors, he refused.

“Oh well,” said the management, “we'll do it ourselves.”

The first attempts to patch “Sakhalin” were unsuccessful. After half a year of poking around in its guts, it drew something, stuck for a long time in assembler inserts, often crashed, throwing the machine into a blue screen. After another patch, the blue screen went away, but instead it began to slightly eat up memory in the driver, so that after five days of work the whole machine had to be rebooted, rebooting the application did not help.

The deadlines were pressing, the management called a crisis meeting, the only solution of which was that “Sakhalin is the last resort”. Naturally, this did not improve the stability of “Sakhalin”.

In the smoking room, conversations began about “technical debts”, about switching to Linux, where everything is “simple and clear”, people began to get used to the shitty work of “Sakhalin”, now any bug could be blamed on “Sakhalin”, saying that “nothing can be done about it” or “contact America”. No one dared to pronounce Filino's name out loud.

Naturally, such a life eventually began to really bother everyone, and the management made the difficult decision to write a new “Sakhalin” and throw out the old one.

It was easier to decide than to write. The new library was named with the proud word “Manhattan” when relations with the Americans were still so-so, now it would probably be called “Valaam” or “Kotlin”, “Kotlin” was not yet occupied.

For about a month and a half, the specialists from the “core” group, we called them “kozura”, were thinking, drawing giant UMLs with thousands of entities on the walls, writing documents, banging something out every day until ten o'clock in the evening, and by the end of the second month they showed a demo with great fanfare. The demo implemented about half a percent of what the old “Sakhalin” could do, used two dozen third-party, “gray” libraries and loaded the processor by one hundred percent when working, which, naturally, did not cause much enthusiasm among people.

Things didn't go further with “Manhattan” than a gluttonous demo, despite the fact that the “peel” leader said at every opportunity that “Manhattan” was “the future” and that “flexibility in it is combined with common sense.” “The Future” was hung out at rallies for a bit longer and then forgotten.

Squeezing “Sakhalin” drop by drop, rewriting and replacing it with small pieces, didn't work either. Over ten years, it penetrated almost every module, holding on tightly there with its functions, sometimes with a dozen parameters, permeating applications from top to bottom.

At the same time, each new boss enthusiastically promised to throw out this “legacy” upon appointment, but bosses came and went, and the “legacy” remained.

In the time since Fili left, they learned how to handle “Sakhalin”. They learned how to assemble it in a special container, which, by the way, was called “Stepashka”. When working, the application was surrounded from all sides by evil “watchers”, zeroing and restarting everything they could at the first symptoms of a failure.

It seemed like it would go on forever, until at some point Sakhalin stopped drawing. That is, completely. It was like a stopped clock on the wall of a house in Hiroshima. Sakhalin froze at 16:46 Moscow time, drawing the topographic grid and scale for the last time. I don’t remember exactly how the story ended, but I do remember that two weeks later we already had a new boss.

It so happened that I left the company and forgot about Sakhalin for a long time. I maintained friendly relations with my former colleagues, although I have been living in another country for a long time. During this time, technologies and fashion for them changed, products and brands appeared and disappeared from the market. And just recently, by chance, I found myself at a specialized exhibition in which that very company took part.

Out of habit, I approached the stand. These were young people, completely unfamiliar to me. They eagerly began to talk about the new product, waving their hands and mentally figuring out who I was and where I was from, until I asked them to show me the bin directory.

It's a pity that Filya didn't see this.