DaedTech

Stories about Software

Jun
20

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What It Really Means to Niche Down

Category: Free Agent Developers Tags: , , | 11 Comments

It’s been a rather frustrating few weeks for me, at least in terms of getting things done at home.  One of the cables on my garage door got off of its track somehow, and my time is at a premium, so I set about hiring someone to fix it.  I went onto Angie’s List to see if I could find a contractor that specialized in solving this sort of problem.

Looking for that was probably stupid, however.  I realized my mistake when I got onto the site and did a search for contractors.  I tried searching for terms like “fixes garage doors” and got empty results back.  Stymied, I started looking at contractor profiles and seeing that they really didn’t match in any way even remotely like that.  Here’s what a typical one looked like.

  • Extremely proficient in hammer, table saw, drill driver, and crowbar.
  • 5 years of experience cutting cables, tying knots, and winding metal cables around spring-loaded spools.
  • Limited experience with reciprocating saw and lathe.
  • Regularly determines the correct situation for using a screw versus a nail.
  • Strong preference for DeWalt tools.
  • Capable of carrying tools in a bag, box, or wheeled assembly as dictated by the job.
  • Excellent oral and written communication skills.
  • FFL, AFF, UON, IBEW, ECB, SE

*Smacked forehead*  Of course!  I’d been going about this all wrong.  I was looking for an expert to solve my problem, when what I really needed to do was spend a lot of time learning the minutiae of what exact skills, tools, and techniques were necessary to solve that problem.  Once I’d spent a few days doing that, I could then make a still ill-informed guess as to which contractor’s experience might prove relevant to my situation.

That’s exactly what I did, and, though you’d assume this would go well, somehow, it didn’t.  The first guy said he had a lot of experience with steel cables, things that twist, and larger fixtures.  As a bonus, he expressed an intimate knowledge of how water would impact the garage door apparatus.  I had no idea how this was relevant, but he sounded like he knew what he was doing, so I hired him.  After two days, I came and found that he hadn’t fixed the door, but he had installed a sink that was blocking my car in.  When I demanded to know why he’d done this, he confessed that he was really more of a plumber, but that he wanted to learn about garage doors and just assumed that they were more or less the same thing.

Sink in Garage

The next guy didn’t build anything that blocked my car in.  As a matter of fact, he didn’t build anything at all.  He just came in for a few days, laid all kinds of screws, nuts, bolts, and magnets on the ground, and then proceeded to arrange, re-arrange, and re-re-arrange them ad nauseum.  Each time he’d do it, he’d squint at the broken garage door apparatus and mutter to himself about it being important to have the right organizational framework to tackle this problem.  When I finally let him go after a few days, he’d managed to build a small pyramid out of 2 inch screws.  I’m not going to lie; it was impressive.  But it was also useless.

Knowing that this was stupid, I did what any reasonable person would do.  Instead of hiring someone to solve my problem, I hired someone that could both understand what I was trying to do and who could also make sense of all of these contractor profiles.  All it cost me was an extra 20% of the job total.

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Jun
14

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Three Martini Open Office Plans

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 11 Comments

A tweet came into my Twitter feed last night, and I noted that (1) I was a little late to the party and (2) it was wildly popular.  I found myself a bit surprised, because it was critical of the open plan office construct, which I figured was by now just an accepted condition of salaried employment, like status meetings or PTO limits.  Apparently, however, this is one particular management fad that has not met with universal approval.  The tweet (shown below), is trending toward 10K likes and retweets.

Personally, I love open plan offices.  Granted, I don’t actually work in one with any regularity, but I enjoy them immensely when I have occasion to park for a few hours at a client site.  It’s sort of like going to the gym, but without the sweating.  Actually, I’d say, it’s more like going to a bar (more on that later).

Three Martini Lunchers

I’m a type A introvert, and I work predominantly from home (or a hotel wherever I happen to be, since I travel a lot).  This means that it’s not uncommon for me to get swept up in my work and log 10+ hour stints of heavy concentration.  For instance, I recently wrote an E-Book for a client in 2 days.  It’s like I go into a sensory deprivation chamber and I get things done, delivering code, write-ups, posts, or whatever to clients on or ahead of schedule.

But following a productivity ‘binge’ like that, there are typically human connection things that have to happen.  I travel to a client site to present something in person or I get on a series of conference calls to collaborate.  It is in these situations that hyper-productivity ends and human connection begins in the meatspace.  Consulting requires more than just output — it requires relationship management.

More and more these days, when I pull that part of a tour of duty, it happens in an open plan office, simply because there are more and more open office plans.  Even clients that don’t have them now talk sheepishly about how they should.  For me, fresh off a week or two of minimal human interaction and intense productivity, I fly somewhere and meet with people for a couple of days, wherein the goal is mainly relationship forging.  In this capacity I’m greeted by someone who proudly demonstrates the egalitarian nature of the office space, and ushers me to a high top or to a focus room or whatever they’re calling it.

At this point, it’s as if I were in a college Starbucks that served a single company.  Some patrons are sitting alone, studying glowing screens, while others gather in impromptu circles, having animated discussions.  There’s the occasional jerk making lots of noise and distracting everyone and the occasional good-natured hijinks in the form or Nerf guns or whatever.  The result is a Dionysian experience to my Appolonian, introverted sensibilities.  I wouldn’t want to try to get serious, thought-intensive work done in such a place (if I needed to do that, I’d obviously leave), but it’s a nice way to obtain social camaraderie without much pressure.

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Jun
12

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Dealing with Legacy Code for Developers: Managing your Manager

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , |

Editorial note: I originally wrote this post for the NDepend blog.  Click here to check out the original, on their site.  While you’re there, take a look around at the other posts and the offering.

Here’s a campfire horror story of legacy code that probably sounds at least somewhat familiar.

One day, your manager strolls by casually, sipping a cup of coffee, and drops a grenade in your lap.  “Do you think we can add an extra field to the customer information form?”  Sure, it may sound innocuous to an outsider, but you know better.

The customer information form is supported by something written almost a decade ago, by a developer long departed.  Getting that data out of the database and onto the form prominently features a 60,000 line class called DataRepositoryManagerHelper and it also makes use of a gigantic XML file with odd spacing and no schema.  Trying to add a field to that form casts you as Odysseus, navigating between Scylla and Charybdis.  In fact, you’re pretty sure that author of the legacy code made it necessary for the assigned developer to cut off and sacrifice a finger to get it working.

Scylla

Aware of all of this, you look at your manager with a mix of incredulity and horror, telling her that you’ll need at least 6 weeks to do this.  Already swirling around your mind is the dilemma between refactoring strategically where you can and running exhaustive manual testing for every character of the source code and XML that you change.  It’s now her turn to look incredulous and she says, “I’m just asking for a new field one one form.”  You’ve told her before about this, and she’s clearly forgotten.  You’re frustrated, but can you really blame her?  After all, it does sound a little crazy.

The Nature of Legacy Code

I’ve talked in the past about legacy code as code that developers are afraid to touch (which I correlate closely with Michael Feathers’ definition as “code without tests”).  If you accept this definition as axiomatic, there’s a critical implication here: legacy code creates a disconnect between the developers and everyone else.

As “everyone else” you see a form that needs a conceptually simple tweak.  As a developer, you see a mythological monster that threatens to rip your digits from your body; you see something that inspires fear.  And, while the bodily fear I’m referring to is an exaggeration, the visceral fear of unknown and lack of understanding is not.  Management is asking you to do something it thinks of as simple, and your head is flooded with an overwhelming number of possibilities as to how this could all go quite wrong.  And, worst of all, it’s really hard to explain this without it sounding as though you’re making excuses, being lazy, or being melodramatic.

If you want to understand how to manage expectations around the legacy code in your codebase, understanding this expectation mismatch is critical.  From that starting point, let’s look at some things you can do to make your life easier.

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Jun
9

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Creating Your Code Review Checklist

Category: The Life of a Programmer Tags: , | 5 Comments

Editorial Note: I originally wrote this post for the SmartBear blog.  You can read the original here, at their site.  There’s a lot of other good stuff over there as well, so look around.

In any line of work, there are a number of rites of passage by which you can mark your career and feel good about milestones achieved.  Programming is no different.

Think back to the first time you were asked to perform a code review.  How exciting! (Though you probably laugh at your younger self now for being excited to review code.)  You spent time as the newest programmer in the organization, under the impression that code reviews were something done to you rather than by you, but now you have confirmation that your opinion is valued.

If you’re anything like me, the first thing you did in such a situation was to scramble to Google and start punching in things like, “how to conduct a code review,” “code review checklist,” or “code review best practices.” Being asked to weigh in on someone’s code is a lot of responsibility, and who wants to screw that up?  In such a Google search, you’ll probably find recommendations that steer you toward a list like this:

  • Does every method have an XML comment?
  • Do classes have a copyright header?
  • Do fields, methods, and types follow our standard naming convention?
  • Do methods have too many parameters?
  • Are you checking validity of method parameters?
  • Does the code have “magic” values instead of named constants?

Seems pretty reasonable, right?  If we brainstormed for an hour or two, we could probably flesh this out to be a comprehensive list with maybe 100 items on it.  And that’s what a lot of code review checklists look like — large lists of things for reviewers to go through and check.  So code review becomes an activity reminiscent of a line supervisor inspecting factory equipment with a clipboard.

Clipboard

There are two problems with this.

  1. You can’t keep 100+ items in your head as you look at every method or clause in a code base, so you’re going to have to read the code over and over, looking for different things.
  2. None of the checks I listed above actually require human intervention. They can all be handled via static analysis.

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Jun
7

By

Chess TDD 62: Finishing Chess TDD

Category: You Asked For It Tags: , , , , | 4 Comments

You might not have expected to read this, and I honestly wasn’t really expecting to write it, but here we are.  I’m going to call it and announce that I’m finishing Chess TDD series.  It’s been a lot of fun and gone on for a long time, and I’m not actually done with the codebase (more on that shortly).

My original intention, after finishing the initial implementation with acceptance and unit tests, was to walk through some actual games, by way of “field testing,” so to speak.  I thought this would simulate QA to some extent — at least as well as you can with a one person operation.  And, with this episode, I’ve showed a tiny taste of what that could look like.  And, I’ve realized, I could go on this way, but that would start to get pretty boring.  And, I’ve also realized that it would be irresponsible.

What I mean is that plugging laboriously through every piece on the board after every move would be showing you a “work harder, not smarter” approach that I don’t advocate.  I’d said that I would save ingesting chess games and using algebraic notation for an upcoming product, and that is true — I plan to do that.  But what I shouldn’t be doing in the interim is saving the smart work for the product and treating you to brainless, boring work in the meantime.

So with that in mind, I brought the work I was doing to a graceful close, wrapping up the feature where initial board positioning was shown to work, and using red-green-refactor to do it.

You’ll notice in the video that the Trello board is not empty by a long shot.  There’s a long list of stuff I’d like to tweak and make better as well as peripheral features that I’d like to add.  But, to use this as a metaphor for business, I have a product that (as best I can tell) successfully tells you all moves available to any piece, and that was the original charter.  It’s shippable, and, better yet, it’s covered with a robust test suite that will make it easy to build on.

What should you look for in the product?  Here are some ideas that I have, off the top (and from Trello).

  • A way to overlay algebraic chess notation for acceptance tests.
  • Remove type checking for a polymorphic scheme.
  • Improve the object graph with better responsibilities (e.g. removing En Passant logic from Board)
  • Apply static analysis tooling to address shortcomings in the code.
  • Make sure that piece movement also works properly (currently it probably wouldn’t for castling/en passant).
  • Develop a scheme for ingesting chess games and verifying that our possibilities/play match.

In short, what I have in mind is bringing this application along with the kinds of work I’d advise the teams that I train/coach and assess.  Here’s how to really make this codebase shine.

I have a couple of things to get off my plate before I productize this, but it’s not going to fall off my radar.  Stay tuned!  And, until then, here is the last of the Chess TDD posts in the format you’re accustomed to.

What I accomplish in this clip:

  • Finish the testing of the initial rows on the board.

Here are some lessons to take away:

  • The new C# language features (as of 6) are pretty great for making your code more compact and functional-appearing in nature.
  • Always, always, always make sure that you’re refactoring only when all tests are green.  I’ve experienced the pain of not heeding this advice, and it’s maddening.  This is a “measure twice, cut once” kind of scenario.
  • Clean, consistent abstractions are important for readability.  If you think of them, spend a little extra time to make sure they’re in place.
  • If something goes wrong with the continuous test runner or your test suite in general, pause and fix it when you notice it.  Don’t accept on faith that “everything should be passing.”  Like refactoring when red because “it’s just a trivial change,” this can result in worlds of downstream pain.

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