The right way and the practical way
Brent Simmons, Reason Number 33,483 to Hate Programming:
Or I could have the superclass expose the appIsTerminating property in its header file, so that the subclass could see it. This also sucks, because a controller class has no business exposing its own copy of global application state.
In the end, though, that’s what I did. (Along with a comment that the property was there for subclasses.)
It reminds me that there are two competing values:
Do everything the right way every time.
Make responsible and professional decisions about time and expenses and benefits and drawbacks.
My nature is to take path #1. It is so hard for me to take path #2. I have the utmost respect who can work on sprawling, modern software and stay on path #2. But path #1, always pulling me in and sending me down rabbit holes.
Sometimes I wonder which of these paths got me to where I am in my career. Others, I wonder if I think I’m a everything-the-right-way person but really I’m a responsible-and-professional-tradeoffs person.
A brain’s a weird place to live.
Framework and Library people
By unscientific survey, I think many developers would prefer to work in a “framework world” where many decisions of principle and organization are passed down by a vendor or architecture team. Think Rails/Django/Laravel for backends, Ember/Elm for frontends, Unity for games. These are the Framework people.
Fewer developers would prefer to create their own world, building up tools and libraries to suit. They select a few first principles and build their own world. They’re the bebop jazz musician, eschewing big band gigs and music people can dance to to create their own intellectual world. These are the Library people.
I’m a Framework person. The allure of Library people sometimes tempts me after I look at a beautifully-restored car or a well-structured song. But constructing a library world is thankless and not particularly high leverage, unless you succeed in creating something for framework people. Weird, eh?
Empathy Required
Nearly fourteen years ago, I graduated college and found my first full-time, non-apprentice-y job writing code. When I wrote code, these were the sorts of things I worried about:
- Where is the code I should change?
- Is this the right change?
- What are the database tables I need to manipulate?
- Who should I talk to before I put this code in production?
Today, I know a lot more things. I did some things right and a lot of things wrong. Now when I write code, these are the sorts of things I worry about:
- Am I backing myself into a corner by writing this?
- Why was the code I'm looking at written this way and what strategy should I use to change it?
- Will this code I just wrote be easy to understand and modify the next time I see it? When a teammate sees it?
- Should I try to improve this code's design or performance more, or ship it?
Half of those concerns are about empathy. They’re only a sampling of all the things I’ve learned I should care about as I write code, but I think the ratio holds up. As I get better and better at programming, as my career proceeds, I need more empathy towards my future self and my teammates.
Further, that empathy needs to extend towards those who are less experienced or haven’t learned the precise things I’ve learned. What works for me, the solutions that are obvious to me, the problems to steer clear of, none of that is in someone else’s head. I can’t give them a book, wait three weeks, and expect them to share my strengths and wisdoms.
That means, when I advise those who listen or steer a team that allows me to steer it, I have to make two camps happy. On one hand, I have to make a decision that is true to what I think is important and prudent. On the other hand, I have to lay out guidelines that lead the listener or teammate towards what I think is important or prudent without micromanagement, strict rules, and other forms of negative reinforcement.
It’s so easy, for me, to just hope that everyone is like me and work under that assumption. But it’s much better, and highly worthwhile, to figure out how to help friends and teammates to level up on their own. It requires a whole lot of empathy, and the discipline to use it instead of impatience. Worth it.
Copypasta, you're the worst pasta
Copypasta. It’s the worst. “I need something like this code here, I’ll just drop it over there where I need it. Maybe change a few things.” Only you can prevent headdesks!
It’s not really possible, in my experience, to make it easier to use code through methods and functions than to just copy what you need and start changing it. No amount of encapsulation or patterns is easier than a pasteboard.
Perhaps, copypasta’s natural predator is a well-informed code review. There are tools, like flay, that can detect some kinds of code duplication.
But for the most part, it’s a battle of dilligence.
(Ed. I found this in my draft folder from four years ago. Copypasta; copypasta never changes.)
Through mocks and back
A problem with double/stub/mock libraries is that they don’t often fail in a total manner. They don’t snap like a pencil when they’re used improperly. Instead, when you use them unwisely, they lay in waiting. At an inopportune time, they leap out.
Change an internal API method name or argument list and your poorly conceived doubles will moan. Rearrange the relationship between classes, and your overly-specific stubs won’t work anymore.
At some point, I felt pretty handy with mocks. Then I wrote a bunch of brittle mocks and decided I needed to go back to square one. I’m through the “just avoid mocks” phase, and now I use them sparingly.
Favor a better API in the code under test, then hand-coded fakes, then stubbed out methods, before finally falling back to a mock. Someone, possibly yourself, will thank you later.
Stevie Wonder, for our times of need
Tim Carmody writing for Kottke.org, Stevie Wonder and the radical politics of love:
Songs in the Key of Life tries to reconcile the reality of the post-Nixon era — the pain that even though the enemy is gone, the work is not done and the world has not been transformed — with an inclusive hope that it one day will be, and that faith, hope, and love are still possible.
It’s what makes the album such a magnificent achievement. But I’m not there. I don’t know when I will be. So for now I’m keeping Songs In the Key of Life on the shelf. An unopened bottle of champagne for a day I may never see. But I’d like to.
On three of Stevie Wonder's best albums, his political writing, and how he bridges saying something and making a good song.
I cannot wait to listen to Songs in the Key of Life again.
How Disney pulls me in
Dave Rupert, Disneyland and the Character Machine:
In October my family took a trip to Disneyland. I couldn’t help but be infected by the magic of Disneyland that allows you to feel young at heart and compells you to wear mouse ears on your head. Walking mile after mile through the park it’s very clear this magic has been painstakingly created and preserved by paying the utmost attention to detail.
There’s magic in paying attention to detail, it’s the slight of hand that helps seamlessly preserve the illusion. At Disney, not only is the illusion preserved, you’re encouraged to take part through cosplay and interacting with your favorite characters. This makes you not just an observer, but also a participant in the ritual.
The level of detail is amazing, completely intentional, and interconnected. You can’t see Tomorrowland from Fantasyland because that would take you out of the moment. You can ask Ana from Frozen about her favorite chocolate because she loves chocolate in the movie.
More than a theme park, Disneyland and Disney World are movie-like experiences you can walk around in, immersed in the joy and excitement of the setting and story.
Does an unadvertised extension point even exist?
There was an extension point, but I missed it.
I was adding functionality to a class. I needed to add something that seemed a little different, but not too far afield, from what the existing code was doing. So I came up with a good name, wrote a method, and went about my day.
A few weeks later, trying to understand an obscure path through this particular class, I found the extension point I should have been using. On one hand, eureka! On the other hand, why didn’t I notice this in the first place?
Did I not consider the open/closed principle enough? Perhaps my “modification” sense should have tingled, sending me to create a new object to encapsulate the behavior with.
Was the extension point hidden by indirection? Perhaps the change going into an ActiveRecord model through me off; I was doing as you’d normally do in a model. I wasn’t expecting another layer of abstraction.
Were my changes too scattered amongst many files? I had modifications in a half-dozen files, plus their tests. It’s possible I was juggling too many things.
Probably it’s all of these things. Lesson learned: when I get to feeling clever and add a handy extension point to make the next person’s job easier, advertise that extension point and make it clear this is probably where they want to make their change.
Perhaps there’s a benign explanation for Paul Ryan appearing to have cut off his phones. Anecdotally, it does not seem GOP Congresscritters are putting much effort into their voicemails or phone lines. I called my representative, Lamar Smith, yesterday afternoon, incensed that he had suggested we listen to Trump and not the media. Both his DC and Austin voicemails were full. I was able to get through this morning and spoke with a staffer who was dismissive but polite.
This practice of neglecting voicemails and only dismissively answering phones during office hours is appalling. The job of our Congress is to represent us. They cannot do that job if they aren’t taking every voicemail, phone, and email into account. Very rarely do I get the feeling Congress wants to even appear they are doing their job.
If I didn’t answer my work email, I’d lose my job. But Congresspeople don’t lose their jobs except for during an election or certain kinds of partisan maneuverings.
Fire Congress anyway. I’ve started with the phones and a whole lot of pent-up frustration. Maybe the infernal hell of fax machines is next?
The TTY demystified. Learn you an arcane computing history, terminals, shells, UNIX, and even more arcanery! Terminal emulators are about the most reliable, versatile tools in my not-so-modern computing toolkit. It’s nice to know a little more about how they work, besides “lots of magic ending in -TY”, e.g. teletypes, pseudo-terminals, session groups, etc.
Clinton Dreisbach: A favorite development tool: direnv. I’ve previously used direnv to manage per-project environment variables. It’s easy to set up and use for this. I highly recommend it! But, I’d never thought of using it to define per-project shell aliases as Clinton does. Smart!
Journalism for people, not power
Journalism is trying very hard to do better, but still failing America. Media is covering politics and not “We, the people”.
Take the coverage of the Republican attempt to neuter congressional oversight and subsequent retreat amidst tremendous scrutiny. Coverage typically read “Donald Trump tweeted about this and by the way a ton of people called their congressperson.” The coverage is focused on what a person in power says. A fascination with celebrity and power.
It’s not focused on the readers, or the people who bear the actions of politicians. Certainly not the disadvantaged who can’t even keep up with politics because they have neither a) the money for a newspaper subscription or b) the time to follow it all between multiple jobs and possibly a family.
It’s focused on what politicians are saying the people want. It’s easy to get a politician to talk about this. That’s part of their job now, skating the public discourse towards the laws they want to pass.
It’s focused on what think tanks want to talk about. Those talking heads on TV and think pieces on the opinion pages? It’s easy to get those people to talk because they’re paid to do those things by giant lobbies and interest groups. They’re paid to get in front of people and tell them what laws they should want.
Journalism should counteract these extensions of the corporate state. When a politician, funded by a lobby, says “the people want affordable health care”, a print or television journalist should say “and here’s what three people not involved in politics actually said”. Maybe they’ll agree with their politicians, maybe they won’t!
When a politician says “we should lower taxes on the top tax bracket”, media should follow up with that that means. Who exactly gets that tax break? Will actually benefit other people? What do people who don’t benefit from that tax break gain or lose because of it.
The next news cycle will come up, the politicians will say one thing. The truth and tradeoffs will reflect another truth. The journalists will go out there and talk about the tradeoffs and what people think now. And then maybe we’ll get a more educated society.
Likely this means the sports and entertainment pages have to subsidize the political coverage. Or we need to start recognizing pieces stuffed with quotes from think tanks and politicians as “advertorial” and not news.
Regardless, political journalism as zero-sum entertainment has to go.
I love overproduced music
It seems like some folks don’t like music with a lot of studio work. Overproduced, they call it. Maybe this is a relic of the days when producers weren’t a creative force on par with the actual performers and artists.
I don’t know, because I love overproduced music. Phil Spector, “Wall of Sound”? Bring it. Large band efforts like “Sir Duke”, “You’re not from Texas”, or “Good Vibrations”? Love it. Super-filtered drum sound? Gotta have it.
It probably has everything to do with, at one point, wanting to pursue a career as a double bassist in symphony orchestras. The pieces I loved the most were the big Romantic tone poems and symphonies with a chorus. Hundreds of people, dozens of unique parks, all playing at the same time, often loudly. It’s the essence of overproduced.
Here’s a curious thing. When I hear “Wouldn’t it be nice?” in my head, it’s much bigger and Wagnerian than it is on Pet Sounds. The pedal tone is bigger and more prominent, the first note after the guitar intro is massive. Maybe I’m just projecting my interpretation onto the song.
Contrast to “Good Vibrations”. There’s always more going on than I remember. Vocal parts, instruments. Sooooo good.
Outside of Brian Wilson, I’ve noticed Jeff Lynne is amongst “the overproducers”. Especially, apparently, how he thins out drum sounds. Love it. Have I ever told you how much I dislike the sound of an raw snare drum?
Turns out Ruby is great for scripting!
Earlier last year, I gave myself two challenges:
- write automation scripts in Ruby (instead of giving up on writing them in shell)
- use system debugging tools (strace, lsof, gdb, etc.) more often to figure out why programs are behaving some way
Of course, I was almost immediately stymied on the second one:
[code lang=text] sudo dtruss -t write ruby -e "puts 'hi!'" Password:
dtrace: failed to execute ruby: dtrace cannot control executables signed with restricted entitlements [/code]
dtruss is the dtrace-powered macOS-equivalent of strace. It is very cool when it works. But. It turns out Apple has a thing that protects users from code injection hijinks, which makes dtrace not work. You can turn it off but that requires hijinks of its own.
I did end up troubleshooting some production problems via strace and lsof. That was fun, very educational, and slightly helpful. Would do again.
I did not end up using gdb to poke inside any Ruby programs. On the whole, this is probably for the better.
I was more successful in using Ruby as a gasp scripting language. I gave myself some principles for writing Ruby automation:
- only use core/standard library; no gem requires, no bundles, etc.
- thus, shell out to programs likely to be available, e.g.
curl - if a script starts to get involved, add subcommands
- don’t worry about Ruby’s (weird-to-me) flags for emulating sed and awk; stick to the IRB-friendly stuff I’m used to
These were good principles.
At first I tried writing Ruby scripts as command suites via sub. sub is a really cool idea, very easy to start with, makes discovery of functionality easy for others, and Just Works. You should try it some time!
That said, often I didn’t need anything fancy. Just run a few commands. Sometimes I even wrote those with bash!
But if I needed to do something less straightforward, I used template like this:
[code lang=text] #!/usr/bin/env ruby
HELP = <<-HELP test # Run the test suite test ci # Run test with CI options enabled test acceptance # Run acceptance tests (grab a coffee….) HELP
module Test module_function
def test
rspec spec
end
… more methods for each subcommand
end
if __FILE == $0 cmd = ARGV.first
case cmd when "ci" Test.ci
… a block for each subcommand
else Test.test end end [/code]
This was a good, friction-eliminating starting skeleton.
The template I settled on eliminated the friction of starting something new. I’d write down the subcommands or workflow I imagined I needed and get started. I wrote several scripts, delete or consolidated a few of them after a while, and still use a few of them daily.
If you’re using a “scripting” language to build apps and have never tried using it to “script” things I “recommend” you try it!
Tinkers are a quantity game, not a quality game
I spend too much time fretting about what to build my side projects and tinkers with. On the one hand, that’s because side projects and tinkers are precisely for playing with things I normally wouldn’t get a chance to use. On the other hand, it’s often dumb because the tinker isn’t about learning a new technology or language.
It’s about learning. And making stuff. Obsessing over the qualities of the build materials is besides the point. It’s not a Quality game, it’s a Quantity game.
Now if you’ll excuse me I need to officiate a nerd horserace between Rust, Elm, and Elixir.