Antonio Tejero, former lieutenant colonel of the Civil Guard and protagonist of the attempted coup d'état on February 23, 1981, has died at the age of 93. Sentenced to 30 years for the assault on Congress, he served 15. His action, interrupting the investiture vote of Calvo-Sotelo with weapons and holding the deputies hostage, marked an episode that, upon failing, ended up consolidating Spanish democracy.
The Architecture of a Coup d'État: Design Flaws and Lack of Scalability 🏗️
Analyzing the 23-F as a project, critical architecture errors are observed. The lack of a unified communication API between the different military and civilian actors generated dis-coordination. The plan lacked redundancy and a *rollback* system in case of failures, such as the non-adhesion of all captaincies. The dependence on a single authority node (the King) as a single point of failure proved to be a flawed design. It was a production deployment without sufficient stress tests.
Tejero and the Art of Interrupting a Session (in a Big Way) 💥
It must be acknowledged that Tejero mastered dramatic interruptions. While today an annoyed user can leave a comment in all caps, he chose to enter the chamber with a tricorn hat and pistol. His Freeze, everybody! far surpasses any CAN WE KNOW WHEN THIS BUG WILL BE FIXED?. That said, his parliamentary kidnapping *feature* had a *downtime* of 17 hours, a response time that no current moderator would allow.