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Mid-aughts I created a thing for healthcare data exchange. Inspired by postfix. Today you'd probably compare it to AWS Lambda and Kinesis. But radically more us
by specialist 6y ago
Mid-aughts I created a thing for healthcare data exchange. Inspired by postfix. Today you'd probably compare it to AWS Lambda and Kinesis. But radically more useful, useable. At the time, I considered it the anti-J2EE.
We could onboard "interface developers" in a week. As in first time seeing Java and deploying code to production. Normal onboarding time was 3-6 months. We figured we had 10 year backlog of work using the more traditional tools (eg BizTalk, SeeBeyond). Our firm awarded $20k bonus for hiring referrals, demand was so great.
So my stack was a serious competitive advantage.
Alas, it was too simple. Our startup got acquired by Quest Diagnostics. They loved themselves some InterSystmes Caché. Their PHBs (Directors and VPs opposed to the acquisition) just couldn't handle that my stuff ran circles around theirs. So of course it had to be killed in the crib.
FWIW, technically, an "interface" (what healthcare calls something that munges HL7 or equiv) was just self contained code. Straight up data processing. Input, transform, output. Pass in a stream and some context, stuff comes out. Compose these snippets just like in Unix. In development, you'd just run it from the command line (or IDE). In production, we had a spiffy process runner with a spiffy management UI. Built-in logging, metrics, dashboards, etc.
I did some AWS Lambda stuff at my last gig. I absolutely fucking hated it. The managed scaling is maybe nice, but table stakes these days. The programming model is just a kick in the berries.
PS- Word about InterSystems. Of course I tried to be a good soldier. My architecture was more important than the implementation language, persistence engine; I really didn't didn't care what tools we used. Oh boy. Caché might be the worst tool I've ever used. For example, one time a compiler error bricked my entire dev runtime, unrecoverable. The Caché partisan mocked me "What did you do?!" Um, a typo. "Duh, don't do that!!" Apparently Caché self immolation is normal. So keep regularly image snapshots. At the time there was no version control options; you'd export "source" and hope it'd reimport later. Ludicrous.