hurting code for fun proﬁt hurting code · 2020. 5. 16. · rubyconf 2007, charlotte nc hurting...

RubyConf 2007, Charlotte NC

Ryan Davis, Seattle.rbHurting Code for Fun & Profit

Hurting Codefor Fun

and Profit1Friday, November 2, 2007



Setting Expectations

• FIX: 117 slides in 45 minutes.• This is going to be fast.• Hopefully fast enough to have time at the end.

• This is a departure from my usual type of talk.• It is more about improving yourself than it is

about improving code.

2Friday, November 2, 2007



A Story




Legacy Code

• Any code you haven't written personally is legacy code.

• Every company already has tons of legacy code.

• Even startups.




Or:12Friday, November 2, 2007



New Place, Inc.




@#$%!!!




CRAC

K!




BLAM

!




SNICK!CR

ACK!

BAM!!!




YAY!




Moral of this story?




People willpress charges

if you hurt them23Friday, November 2, 2007



Code won’t.




This talk is a“coming out”event for me




My name is Ryan, and…




…I like to hurt code…




…and I'm OK!




Why hurt code?

• Hurting code is fun!

• It can make you a better tester and developer.

• It can make code cleaner, clearer, easier to test.




Ruby Sadism:nounDeriving pleasure from inflicting pain on software.Esp. bad software.




It is just another way of looking at software

development.




I cackle everytime I can find code I can punish.




Code that has complexity I know I

can strip out.




It is about changing your perspective on

bad code.




Make it fun to hunt it down and fix it and

you'll do it more often.




Ruby Sadism comes in many forms:




Killing a bug by writing a new test.




Reading overly clever code and

itching to rip it to shreds.




Nuking bad design, making it faster with less

code.




and many, many more.




An Example

• A 2 month social media rails project dragged on for 12 months.

• Tying ActiveRecord to WebDAV. Emulating the entire DB via WebDAV properties.Needlessly complex and slow!

• So, I ripped out WebDAV over the weekend.




Finished in 74.77783 seconds.622 tests, 2502 assertions

After:

Before:

Finished in 5.258559 seconds.330 tests, 961 assertions




Test Time Over 6 Months

Post DAV

DAV




For Some Reason,People Love Complexity.




They revel in it.




Ruby does not seem unique in this regard.




I am not one of those people.




But, I used to be one of those people.




I got better...




20071984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004

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Asceticism

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etc

BASIC

My Programming History




Ruby Asceticism:nounCharacterized by or suggesting the practice of severe self-discipline & abstention from all forms of indulgence.




Flagellants




Test First is a form of self-discipline.




YAGNI is a form of abstention.




Ruby Ascetics:

Real Life™ Ruby

Eschew material possesions.

Eschew extra complexity.

Self-disciplined to achieve higher

spirituality.

Self-disciplined to achieve better

understanding of self & coding mind.




What is Indulgence?

• Needless complexity and overly-clever code.

• Code or design you don't immediately need.The “what abouts”.

• Technical debt.




Technical Debt

• Skipping design is like borrowing money.

• Refactoring is like repaying principal.

• Interest is paid as time dealing with complexity.

—Ward Cunningham–ComplexityAsDebt, c2.com




80:20 aka Pareto Principal

• In most systems, there is an imbalance between producers/consumers, money/people, etc.

• 85+% of the land is owned by 5% of the people.

• 80% of the time spent in only 20% of the code.

• Use this tendency to focus efforts efficiently and objectively.




Signal : Noise

• Often related to 80:20.• Focus on what's important.• Unclutter, minimize interruptions and extraneous

tasks to get the real work done.

• As my favorite manager likes to say:• Big Alligators, Little Alligators, Swamp




In Other Words:

“A developer’s obligation is to make sure that the code as written makes the clearest possible statement as to how the solution

was understood at the time of writing.”

–Ward Cunningham, c2.com




I think Ruby sadism and asceticism are

very powerful.




But getting there isn't easy.




It requires understanding yourself

as much as you understand the code.




IntrospectionOriented Development




How do do better?

How did overlook that bug?

Where am lacking clarity?

How can use my tools better?

Where do waste most of my time?

How do focus better?

Where am holding myself back?

Am wrong?I65Friday, November 2, 2007



Ask these questionsconstantly!




Self-Improvement:Read!

• 1 nerd book / month = 12× industry avg.

• c2.com & other wikis w/ smart people.

• Get as close to the experts as possible.

• 10-20-ish smart blogs.




Self-Improvement:Focus!

• Stay away from:• WTF, coding horror, and other idiot forums.• A bazillion blogs in your feed reader.• Tons of high flow mailing lists.

• Work on what's actually important.




–7 Habits of Highly Effective People–Covey

Urgent Not Urgent

Important

Not Important

Pressing MattersFire Fighting

Deadline Driven Projects

PreventionProactive Planning

Implementing SystemsBurnout Prevention

InterruptionsSome FirefightsMost Meetings

TVYoutube

Other Time wasters




• Learn one new language a year.• Learn your tools, in depth. Now in depther.• Examine your development habits.• Study something non-coding oriented.• Cross-discipline people are always more

interesting and often write better code.

Self-Improvement:Grow!




Self-Improvement:Push!

Write more code, lots of it.

Quantity > Quality(sometimes)




Pottery Challenge

• A pottery teacher told half his class that their grade will depend on one single piece that they'll produce at the end of the term.

• He told the other half that their grade will be based on the volume of all the pieces they create.

• Which half do you think produced better work by the end?




“The function of the overwhelming majority of your artwork is simply to

teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.

One of the basic and difficult lessons every artist must learn is that even the failed

pieces are essential.”

—Art & Fear—Bayles & Orland




• Be competitive.

• Challenge the Status Quo.

• They are almost always wrong.

• (Even when they’re right)

Self-Improvement:Push, more!




Don't be a sheep




Self-Improvement:Feel!

• Let your emotions flow. Have an opinion.• But don't let them rule you.

• zentest, flog, & heckle all came from love of good developer tools.

• vlad & image_science came from hate of impossibly complex code.• I spent 10 hrs debugging ONE issue in

capistrano before writing vlad.




Self-Improvement:Feedback

• Use feedback:

• Ask for it.

• Listen to it.

• Feed the feedback back.




Find Your Balance

0% Action 100%

Thought

0%

100%

CodeCowboy

Mentarbator

Analysis-Paralysis Sweet

Spot

CouchPotato




Tools That Can Help




autotest

• You probably didn't realize that using autotest is a form of ruby sadism and asceticism, did you?

• Poor doom guy...




• Complexity reporter based on ABC metrics.

• Flog score correlates to testing complexity.

• Higher the flog score, the harder it is to get complete (& good) test coverage.

Flogclass Test def blah # 11.2 = a = eval "1+1" # 1.2 + 6.0 + if a == 2 then # 1.2 + 1.2 + 0.4 + puts "yay" # 1.2 end endend

Test#blah: (11.2) 6.0: eval 1.2: branch 1.2: == 1.2: puts 1.2: assignment 0.4: lit_fixnum




main#none: (22.9) 7.0: to_proc_normal 3.3: assignment 3.1: branch 2.0: inject 1.8: constantize 1.8: association 1.6: columns 1.6: options 1.4: [] 1.4: block_pass 1.4: map 1.2: include? 1.2: keys

Needless Complexity 1if MODELS.keys.inject(true) {|b, klass| b and klass.constantize.columns.map(&:name).include? association.options[:foreign_key]} then # ...end

1line if(!) 132chars 132avg len22.9flog




Needless Complexity 2

main#none: (23.5) 7.5: to_proc_normal 4.7: assignment 3.4: branch 2.2: inject 1.9: constantize 1.7: columns 1.5: block_pass 1.5: map 1.5: association 1.3: include? 1.3: keys 1.3: options 1.1: []

fk = association.options[:foreign_key]if MODELS.keys.inject(true) {|b, klass| b and klass.constantize.columns.map(&:name).include? fk} then # ...end

3lines 144chars 48avg chars23.5flog





main#none: (22.8) 7.0: assignment 6.0: to_proc_normal 4.5: branch 2.3: map 2.2: inject 1.6: constantize 1.5: association 1.4: columns 1.3: include? 1.3: options 1.3: keys 1.2: block_pass 1.1: []

fk = association.options[:foreign_key]columns = MODELS.keys.map { |key| key.constantize.columns.map(&:name) }if columns.inject(true) {|b, column| b and column.include? fk} then # ...end






main#none: (20.8) 6.0: to_proc_normal 4.6: assignment 3.3: branch 2.3: map 1.6: constantize 1.5: association 1.4: columns 1.3: keys 1.3: options 1.2: block_pass 1.2: include? 1.1: [] 1.1: all?

fk = association.options[:foreign_key]columns = MODELS.keys.map { |key| key.constantize.columns.map(&:name) }if columns.all? {|column| column.include? fk} then # ...end






main#none: (15.9) 5.9: assignment 4.5: branch 2.3: map 1.6: constantize 1.5: association 1.4: columns 1.3: name 1.3: options 1.3: keys 1.2: include? 1.1: [] 1.1: all?

fk = association.options[:foreign_key]columns = MODELS.keys.map { |key| key.constantize.columns.map { |c| c.name } }if columns.all? {|column| column.include? fk} then # ...end


Cleaner, Clearer, and Much Faster




Coverage ToolsAre awesome at showing gaping holes.




…but…




Do not signify quality of tests at all.




"We have 100% coverage"




… So What?!?




You can have 100% coverage with 0

assertions.




(or, more often, bad assertions)




Absurd Exampleclass Life def meaning 42 endend

class TestLife < Test::Unit::TestCase def test_meaning actual = Life.new.meaning expected = 6 * 9 # assert_equal expected, actual endend




What does 100% coverage mean then?




Coverage is the X-ray of the code world.




Don't use it when you're bleeding out.




Heckle• Most sadistic tool I've written.

• Mutates your implementation (on the fly) to verify that your tests are good.

• If your tests still pass after mutation, you missed an edge case.




In Closing




Frank Herbert was wrong




Fear is not themind-killer




Apathy is themind-killer




You have to careabout the code




Love it




or Hate it




Either is preferableto Apathy




Preferable to the developer who says




“I’m just paidto write code”




You'll wind up maintaining their code




(because they will move on)




Hating their code.




Their impact on the project.




On the team.




So Love the code…




…or Hate it.




If you love it:




Nurture it.




Grow it.




Make it beautiful.




If you hate it:




Hurt it.




Pare it back.




Rewrite it.




Just be passionate about what you work on.




Otherwise you'redead inside




…and so is your code.




Thank You.


hurting code for fun proﬁt hurting code · 2020. 5. 16. · rubyconf 2007, charlotte nc hurting...

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