I was doing some security evaluation work this week on a platform that surfaces information from functional tests of web applications. It had a somewhat obtuse

I was doing some security evaluation work this week on a platform that surfaces information from functional tests of web applications. It had a somewhat obtuse onboarding process so I just copied one of their tutorial applications thinking that would be and easy way to get some data flowing through the tool. Running on Amazon Linux it took nearly two hours for me to descend into the pits of ruby/rvm/node/puppeteer/headless chrome to get the damn thing ‘working’. Broken builds, missing tools, wrong major releases, segfaults, path issues, byzantine environment variable dependencies. I felt like Hal fixing the light bulb and I still have no idea what actually is going on when I run the tests. I just get the API requests I need and the rest feels like a black box in the form of nested Klein bottles. I was really feeling my BOFH oats by the end of it and dismissing everyone that deals with that mess every day as a flock of sadists. I’ve since calmed down and realized that it’s probably not that bad if it actually is your day job. I just know that if I depended on that heap to actually do anything more than run some unit tests I would have years of acclimation in front of me.