A few years ago, a submarine cable was knocked out, between our startup's MVP servers in Singapore AWS, and our networked factory stations in Asia.
In lieu of the submarine cable, something closer to a wet string was being routed over. It had such high latency and packet loss, that a watchdog timer I'd implemented on the stations was timing out.
Fortunately, the remote access we'd built into our stations (SSH and OpenVPN) still worked, albeit at slow speeds, like a 300 baud dialup, and crazy-high latency.
Having occasionally dealt with performance a bit like that as a kid, and knowing my way around Linux, it was like "I've been training my whole life for this moment."
So I just flexed the old command-line-and-editor-when-you-feel-every-byte-transmitted skill, and got the stations working, before the factory even knew about the submarine cable, saving our infinite-9s uptime.
It was nothing compared to what NASA does, but terminal animation effects would've ended both of our missions.
In lieu of the submarine cable, something closer to a wet string was being routed over. It had such high latency and packet loss, that a watchdog timer I'd implemented on the stations was timing out.
Fortunately, the remote access we'd built into our stations (SSH and OpenVPN) still worked, albeit at slow speeds, like a 300 baud dialup, and crazy-high latency.
Having occasionally dealt with performance a bit like that as a kid, and knowing my way around Linux, it was like "I've been training my whole life for this moment."
So I just flexed the old command-line-and-editor-when-you-feel-every-byte-transmitted skill, and got the stations working, before the factory even knew about the submarine cable, saving our infinite-9s uptime.
It was nothing compared to what NASA does, but terminal animation effects would've ended both of our missions.