AWS Saves Ukraine’s Data | WPF ‘is not Dead’ (yet) | Devs Quit for Cash

Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

This week: Amazon S3 is keeping Ukraine’s data safe, we ask if Windows Presentation Foundation is dead, and developers tell us why they switch jobs.

1. AWS Snowball Edge Hides Data From Russia

First up this week: Shedloads of Ukrainian government data have been quietly removed and stored away in Amazon Web Services. Tannenbaum was right: A bunch of 80 TB Snowball Edge S3 units have exfiltrated 10,000 TB of vital data.

Analysis: Putin’ data in the cloud

In modern warfare, data can be a target. Farsighted government leaders realized this and acted to prevent its loss to the enemy.

Russ Mitchell: How Amazon put Ukraine’s ‘government in a box’ — and saved its economy from Russia

“You can’t take out the cloud with a cruise missile”
Since the day Russia launched its invasion Feb. 24, Amazon has been working closely with the Ukrainian government to download essential data and ferry it out of the country in suitcase-sized solid-state computer storage units called Snowball Edge, then funneling the data into [AWS]. The data, 10 million gigabytes so far, represent “critical information infrastructure … core for operation of the economy, of the tax system, of banks, and the government overall,” … said Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s 31-year-old … minister of digital transformation.
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Liam Maxwell, head of government transformation at Amazon Web Services … based in London, had already been working with Ukraine for years when it became clear by January that Russia planned to attack. … The Snowball units, in their shock-proof gray containers, were flown from Dublin to Krakow, Poland. Then the Ukrainians “spirited these devices over the border” [he] said.
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The data also include … the population register, land and property ownership records, tax payment records, bank records, education registries, anti-corruption databases and more. … After the data downloads … the Snowballs, loaded with up to 80 terabytes of encrypted data each, are shipped back to Amazon. … “You can’t take out the cloud with a cruise missile.”

This Anonymous Coward groks why:

Love or hate Amazon, the fact is that shifting the data to physical storage outside the country means it’s far, far safer than keeping it on networks inside the country where Russia is physically invading, and attacking. Russia can blow up a Ukrainian data centre with an SRBM, but they sure as hell ain’t going to dare blow up Frankfurt, Paris, London, and Ireland to take out key AWS data centres.
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Amazon also has significant experience in protecting against state sponsored hackers, so they’re also almost certainly better placed to protect the data digitally than Ukraine itself is. … It would require multiple people across the business to all be compromised.

Bringing the obligatory snark, it’s TheOtherOne:

The first step of building Skynet? … Hold onto all the governments of the world’s data in one place.

2. Windows Presentation Foundation on Life Support?

WTF is Microsoft doing with WPF? Microsoft senior program manager Olia Gavrysh sowed panic last week, by calling it a community run project.

Analysis: Yet another Windows UI dead end

I’ve lost count of the number of semi-abandoned, half-baked, incompatible Microsoft frameworks. It seems to be more about the egos of product owners in Redmond than the needs of actual developers.

Tim Anderson: Microsoft worries Windows desktop developers

“Microsoft has struggled to establish a successor”
A Microsoft .NET Community Standup has left Windows desktop developers wondering what kind of future, if any, the company has planned for … Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). A “what’s new” slide [showed] “Community Run Project” as the first bullet point, causing consternation among attendees.
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The slide was perhaps misinterpreted. It was intended as an update on what is happening with pull requests from the community. … Nevertheless, concerns about the future of the framework are well founded. … Managing a widely-used project is never easy though.
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Why do developers still use these old frameworks? Windows Forms dates from the launch of .NET in 2001, and WPF from Windows Vista in 2006. The problem is that Microsoft has struggled to establish a successor desktop framework with an equally good combination of developer productivity and capability. … The pace of development has been slow. … The message seems to be that these frameworks are no longer strategic to Microsoft—except as legacy technology that it is keen to keep working.

For devs, it’s a quality-of-life issue, says tomalaci:

WPF always felt unfinished and missing many QoL features. I was hoping they would further refine and make it easier to work with but I guess it was never meant to be. … I am utterly confused what is happening with UI development on Windows ecosystem. On the rare occasion I want to develop desktop app, I have used Avalonia UI, which seems to be … more stable than what MSFT churns out every year or two, can highly recommend that.
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They are really destroying Windows ecosystem by pushing out new framework every few years that always feels half-finished before they move on to the next one. This is, of course, on top of Windows versions in general with how they pile new half-finished UI reworks that just keeps piling on insane amounts of technical debt and legacy for future maintenance.

Here’s another vote for Avalonia, cast by Dutch Gun:

Winforms and WPF may be deprecated at some point, but there’s far too many of those apps out there to worry about MS ever actually removing support for those. It just means there will only be the barest minimum of maintenance going forward. It’s the same with native Win32 apps.
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I’m pretty much done relying on MS for a UI framework. … My next personal project will probably use AvaloniaUI. They call it a “spiritual successor” to WPF [but] open source and cross-platform: Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS.

3. Developer Survey Results are IN

StackOverflow has been asking developers about their job-switching plans, and what motivates them to stay or go. I don’t think you need to be a statistics PhD to interpret the results.

Analysis: Survey Surprises Simply Nobody

Devs change jobs for more money, better flexibility and growth opportunities. I know, I know: Stop the press. Season’s greetings, everyone.

Liam Tung: Three-quarters of developers are willing to quit for a new job

“Salary matters, but it's not the only motivation”
The percentage of younger developers actively searching for their next role increased nine points year over year, according to [a] survey of 2,600 developers by StackOverflow. … Some 54% of respondents to the StackOverflow survey said a better salary is the largest motivator when considering a new opportunity.
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Salary matters, but it’s not the only motivation to look for a new job. … Developers also want flexibility and the option to work from home, with 46% citing starting/ending the day at a precise time or being expected to work from an office (44%) as the top drawbacks in their current roles.

Horse’s mouth? Erin Yepis:

The last year has been a time of re-evaluation and opportunity for technology professionals. … In October 2022, we surveyed 2,600+ tech professionals to learn more about the wants, needs, and expectations of developers.
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Younger developers are more likely to be actively looking for their next role. … This rise in young job applicants … suggests a wave of new tech talent is ready to enter the workforce.
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While salary remains a primary motivator for developers … the desire to work with new technologies came in second as a reason to leave. [While] flexibility (58%), salary (54%), and learning opportunities (54%) … convince them to stay in their current role. … Respondents cite a focus on the developer experience (42%), the product or solution the company is selling (35%), and learning from individuals outside of their team (34%) as the top factors that make a company more appealing to work for.

Wait. Pause. Is this actually news? cuda13579 sounds slightly sarcastic:

What shocking news! It might as well say “People with jobs are open to taking better jobs.”

The Moral of the Story:
Everybody wants to be famous—but nobody wants to do the work

—Kevin Hart

You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.

Image: Isaiah McCarty (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)