¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Inspired by Simon Willison’s TIL.

When I was working on the Stadia Partner Portal as a full-stack tech lead, I wrote and maintained a run.sh script that would start up our two (front-end and back-end) Boq¹ server instances.

It resembled the following:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

cleanup() {
  kill $pid_fe $pid_be
  exit 0
}

trap cleanup SIGINT

start_fe() {
  # [...init deps...]
  boq run //java/com/google/chrome/cloudcast/[...]/publishing/partnerportal/ui &
  pid_fe=$!
}

start_be() {
  # [...init deps...]
  boq run //java/com/google/chrome/cloudcast/[...]/publishing/partnerportal &
  pid_be=$!
}

start_fe
start_be

wait

This version is heavily simplified, but that was its gist. It worked perfectly. Back in ~2018, it took quite a bit of trial-and-error to get it right. Now it seems so easy to just ask GenAI to generate it for you! Yikes. Our profession might get obsoleted in just a few more years to come…