What developers
can learn from
Soviet space failures

Andrey Sitnik, Evil Martians

product development consultancy

The creator of

Autoprefixer

PostCSS

Browserslist

@sitnikcode

Wikipedia and space are my passions

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Space industry sometimes looks like IT

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Every country makes mistakes

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Story 1

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1968

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New Soviet spaceship, Soyuz

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Like

DHTML

jQuery

React

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56 year of maintaince. The real legacy project.

1967

2023

1967

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To the Moon: direct vs. two ships

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Two ships flight requires docking

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Soyuz 2 & Soyuz 3 docking test

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Pilots

Soviet Robot (Soyuz 2)

Georgy Beregovoy (Soyuz 3)

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Docking

Error

ERROR

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Next try

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Error again

ERROR

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Landing without success

Why?

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The spaceship was upside down

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What did they do with him?

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Changed docking instructions

  • Only perform docking on the sunny side of the orbit
  • Give pilots time to adjust in orbit

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Lesson 1

There are no stupid users—only bad UX

PostCSS has special checks for popular mistakes

} else if ( typeof i === 'object' && (i.parse || i.stringify) ) {
    throw new Error('PostCSS syntaxes cannot be used as plugins. ' +
                    'Instead, please use one of the ' +
                    'syntax/parser/stringifier options as ' +
                    'outlined in your PostCSS ' +
                    'runner documentation.');
if ( e.name === 'CssSyntaxError' && opts && opts.from ) {
    if ( /\.scss$/i.test(opts.from) ) {
        e.message += '\nYou tried to parse SCSS with ' +
                     'the standard CSS parser; ' +
                     'try again with the postcss-scss parser';

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Story 2

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1969

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Start in Soyuz 4, land in Soyuz 5

Boris Volynov

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Boris Volynov should land alone

Boris Volynov

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Soyuz spaceship

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Separation before landing

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Soyuz 5 separation

Thermal shield

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Hatch was in the front during re-entry

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What will you do?

Blame USSR

Blame engineers

Pray to God

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He recorded every detail of separation

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Luckily, tank explosion separated modules

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He landed successfully

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Lesson 2

Always report about issues.

Even if it was a documentation issue.

My favorite type of PRs to PostCSS

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Story 3

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1997

Mir space station

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Mir was the first modular space station

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Every module is an independent spaceship

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Modules could even change the position

1990

1995

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Like multicellular organism

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Modules and ships dock automatically

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Mir crew

Vasili Tsibliyev
Aleksandr Lazutkin
Michael Foale

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Remote control to replace auto-docking system

Commands

Video

Like

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The result

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The result

Decompression

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Cut cables, close hatch

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They lost power

40 % of solar panels

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Not the best day

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Like

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Module was decompressed until Mir deorbit

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Lesson 3

People make mistakes.
Prefer automatic tools.

ESLint: the most popular robot

JSLint

JSHint

ESLint

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.foo {
  margin-top: 20px;
  width: 100px;
  height: 100px;
  margin: 0 auto;
}
Stylelint: this overrides the longhand property before it app.css:5:3

Stylelint: robot to checks CSS

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stylelint-order: robot to keep order in CSS

.wrapper {
  top: 20px;
  margin-left: 20px;
  display: flex;
  position: absolute;
  height: 100%;
  margin-bottom: 20px;
  border-radius: 5px;
  color: red;
  justify-content: center;
  margin-left: 2px;
  left: 0px;
  width: 100%;
  border: 1px solid red;
}
.wrapper{
  position: absolute;
  top: 20px;
  left: 0;

  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;

  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  margin-bottom: 20px;
  margin-left: 20px;
  margin-left: 2px;

  color: red;

  border: 1px solid red;
  border-radius: 5px; 
}

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Size Limit: robot to check JS library size

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Contacts

What developers can learn from Soviet space program failures

By Andrey Sitnik

What developers can learn from Soviet space program failures

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