Alright, so you’re asking about this “tandemous” idea, huh? Sounds fancy, like everything just clicks and works one after the other, super smooth. Well, let me tell you about a little project I got myself into, thinking I was gonna be all clever setting things up in tandem.
I had these two older computers, see? Nothing special, just stuff I had lying around. And I got this bright idea to make them work together on a single task. One was supposed to prep a bunch of files, like, sort and filter them, and then the second one would pick ’em up and do the heavy lifting, some processing stuff. Tandem, right? One after the other, nice and orderly. That was the dream, anyway.
So, I started. First thing, getting these two dinosaurs to even talk to each other properly. Man, that was a trip. One was running some ancient version of Linux I hadn’t touched in years, the other a Windows version that probably belonged in a museum. Network shares? Permission denied. SSH? Connection refused. I swear, I spent a whole Saturday just poking around settings, rebooting, and muttering to myself. You know how it is, you change one tiny thing, and then something else breaks. Classic.
I figured, okay, once they can see each other, the rest will be a piece of cake. Just a few scripts, tell one machine to watch a folder, tell the other to dump files there. Wrong again. The scripting part, oh boy. What works on one machine throws a fit on the other. Different command syntaxes, different ways of handling file paths. It was like trying to get two grumpy old men who speak different dialects to cooperate. I was pulling my hair out, almost gave up a couple of times.
I remember this one part, I was trying to get the first machine to signal the second one when a batch of files was ready.
- Tried a simple flag file. Sometimes it worked, sometimes the second machine missed it.
- Looked into some lightweight message queue thing. Too complicated for what I needed, felt like overkill.
- Even thought about sending an email from one machine to an account the other machine checked. Seemed ridiculous.
Eventually, I got a clunky system going. It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t fast. But, kind of, sort of, it worked. Machine A would do its bit, dump the files, and then, after a bit of a pause and a prayer, Machine B would slowly wake up and start its part. It was tandemous, but in the most awkward, creaky way possible. Like a tandem bicycle ridden by two people who aren’t quite pedaling in sync.
So, yeah, that was my big tandem adventure. It wasn’t the smooth, efficient operation I pictured. It was a lot of trial and error, a lot of “why isn’t this working?!”, and a healthy dose of just making do with what I had. Sometimes, I guess, getting things to work “in tandem” is less about clever design and more about just being too stubborn to quit. Learned a bit, that’s for sure. Mostly about my own patience, or lack thereof!
