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
@sitnikcode
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';@sitnikcode
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
