My little adventure with Katerina and Tomas
Alright, let me tell you about this thing I worked on involving ‘Katerina’ and ‘Tomas’. These weren’t people, well, not directly involved day-to-day, but they were the names we gave to two parts of a system I needed to connect.
So, the task started pretty straightforward: get information out of the ‘Katerina’ module and push it into the ‘Tomas’ module. Sounds simple, right? That’s what I thought too.
I jumped into ‘Katerina’ first. Getting the data out wasn’t too bad initially. I spent some time figuring out the commands, digging through some old notes someone left. Got the basics flowing. The data itself was a bit rough around the edges, but it was there. Felt like I was making good progress.
Then came ‘Tomas’. This part was supposed to receive the data. I looked at what ‘Tomas’ expected. And wow, it was completely different. The format, the structure, everything. It was like Katerina spoke Spanish and Tomas only understood German.
My first attempt was direct translation. I tried writing a quick script. Pull from Katerina, twist the data around, push to Tomas. It worked… sometimes. Like, maybe on a Tuesday if the wind blew just right.
- Katerina would sometimes hiccup and send weird data. My script would crash.
- Tomas would sometimes be busy or offline. My script would fail.
- Sometimes the sheer amount of data from Katerina choked the script before it even got to Tomas.
It was frustrating. I spent more time babysitting this connection than doing actual useful work. Every morning, I’d check the logs, fix whatever broke overnight. It felt clumsy, held together with digital tape.
After a few weeks of this patching and praying, I realized this direct approach was just not going to cut it. It was too brittle. Katerina and Tomas were just too different, too independent.
So, I changed tactics. I decided to build a little ‘middle ground’. A small holding area, you could say. The plan was:
- Get the data from Katerina, whenever it was ready, no rush.
- Clean it up properly inside this new middle zone. Standardize it.
- Store it there temporarily.
- Then, have a separate process that checks Tomas. When Tomas is ready, it takes the clean data from the middle zone and sends it over in the exact format Tomas likes.
Building this middle piece took a bit more effort upfront. Had to set up a simple storage, write more careful logic for cleaning and sending. But you know what? It worked. Beautifully.
Now, Katerina can do its thing, messy or not. Tomas can be ready whenever it wants. The middle ground handles the traffic, smooths things out. No more daily fires. It just runs.
So yeah, that was my journey with Katerina and Tomas. Started simple, got complicated, then found a robust way by not forcing them together directly. Sometimes the best way to connect two things is to put something helpful in between.
