But what do we do at EURL Barme?
26/01/2015
As illustrated by its organizational chart, the entire EURL Barme team is always fully mobilized in all its projects or activities, from the basement to the attic. While this organizational chart may be humorous, it reflects the reality of an organization that recalls the inverse of the principle of the Galaxians from Scrameustache. Everything seems slower from the outside. But for EURL Barme's clients, this offers the immense advantage of dealing with a versatile team with perfect cohesion; information transmission within EURL Barme is instantaneous!
In reality, the developer is by far the most productive role (and paradoxically the least well-paid). He has accumulated considerable development experience over a period of more than 386DEC40h seconds (that is, more than 30 years). Through the multiple (programming) languages he has practiced, he retains some fundamental ideas. No matter the set of instructions, it's what you do with them that counts. A good development is all in parallel: coding, testing, and specifications but especially testing. And his version of "the simpler, the better": the less code there is, the fewer bugs there are! Nevertheless, he has designed and written entire applications of great complexity such as the very specific ERP of Sextant-Expertise. To give an idea, at the last count, this application is very precisely described by more than 180 pages of concise specifications, with a font size of 10.
The programs developed by EURL Barme have in common a minimalist interface that hides often very complex processes but always of great robustness. The subjects are most varied: accounting, management of customer preferences for a jewelry store, rental of a luthier-archetier's instrument park, including the associated generation of a SEPA bank remittance file, quote management for a locksmith-metalworker, navigation tracking (at sea) on the Internet, sharing resources between associations, and most recently a Unique Database (BDU) service in SaaS mode…
The EURL Barme developer works in perfect symbiosis with the database administrator, an essential element of modern developments. In addition to participating in application design, he also intervenes in analyzing the rare problems that arise in operation. He is capable of intervening on a production database without disrupting it: an exercise that requires perfect control of the situation and great rigor.
The other directly productive role of EURL Barme is assumed by the network technician, a maniac of rigorous organization who would gladly spend hours untangling cabling if given the time. He actually performs the most technical interventions at EURL Barme. With the update of a satellite phone's firmware done over 10,000 km and 10 hours time difference, he holds a remote intervention record that will be hard to beat. Recently invested in VoIP, he delights in dividing clients' telecommunications bills by up to 10, at a higher level of functionality.
The system administrator represents in a way a synthesis of the three previously mentioned roles. He manages EURL Barme's servers and those of its clients. He configures them with a bonsai-like minimalism in terms of the number and size of installed elements, giant sequoia-like in terms of processing power, and ginkgo biloba-like in terms of security by reference to this species' ability to resist even nuclear bomb irradiations. He also ensures their monitoring and the implementation of countermeasures adapted to the incessant progress of cybercrime. His preferred tools are the command line and the famous vi, a file editor older than him. With them, he tracks the origin of the slightest suspicious error message noted in the logs, even scouring all available Internet sources and manuals, in English of course. The advantage of this role is that it is preferably exercised at night and on weekends. This avoids access conflicts with EURL Barme's other roles.
Through the multiple facets of the skills exercised within EURL Barme, we ultimately have a good illustration of what the combination of the concepts of devop and full stack could designate. In any case, the clients who benefit from it keep asking for more!