In a great book “A philosophy of software design” John Ousterhout points out that software engineering is not only about quick delivery of digital products. He stresses the importance of long-term perspective – strategic programming. This idea is well known at least since Clean Code, but still somehow ignored. For some reason, many view refactoring or improving code structure as merely a fanciful dream of coders chasing perfection.
It’s the opposite. It’s a necessity if we don’t want the project to collapse.
“The most important thing is the long-term structure of the system. (…) Your primary goal must be to produce a great design, which also happens to work” – says Ousterhout.
It doesn’t mean we should chase beauty and not deliver. It means we must remember that delivering poorly structured code will soon – much sooner than most of us think – cause issues.
POCs become MVPs, MVPs become products, products start earning money, they need scaling, and new features… and boom – suddenly company needs 5 developers to slowly implement new functionalities and perform basic maintenance of an application which was written by one intern in two months.
The inception of a project should always be the most appreciated and well-planned stage. Like pregnancy. We don’t drink, smoke and party in the 1st trimester just to eat whole foods in 8th month – but it’s exactly what we do with code of our IT projects often. We do whatever in the first stage, and then when it’s too late we bring the best engineers to save it.
Remember, engineers: strive to create the best designs possible. Our lives depend on it!
Many developers are not native English speakers. Some special characters used in programming may be difficult to remember. Here is a list of special characters used in programming with their names in English:
A picture is worth a thousand words. Technical debt is what you see above. A temporary solution that over a period became a problem. Sometimes smaller, sometimes bigger. But the longer we wait the bigger is the risk it will explode and cover our business with odorous excrement. Moreover, like any debt, the longer we keep the liability, the bigger our payback will be.
You could say – who would be so careless to keep such a temporary solution for a long time! You are right. But as they say, temporary workarounds are the most persistent ones. Sometimes there is no time. Sometimes there are no resources. Later there is no time or resources to transform a temporary solution into something proper. Therefore, it stays with us. Until it becomes dangerous.
Technical debt exists in every IT project. In other forms, this phenomenon exists everywhere. In our home, at some messy place which starts to grow until suddenly we realize our whole apartment is a mess. In our body, where few cells grow out of control, and after many years we are diagnosed with cancer. In any business, where crucial operations are done by some single old person who suddenly dies or uses some ancient hardware that breaks and destroys the whole company.
Technical debt is a seed of chaos. The responsibility of software developers and IT managers is to keep it under control. Otherwise, we will be consumed by it one day. No matter the cost – let’s do not let it grow!
Google products are awesome. Gmail, Android, and Google search engine itself. Whoever used Duckduckgo or Baidu knows how awesome Google search engine is… There’s however one thing which drives me crazy: it’s Google Drive.
In particular, the sync engine of Google Drive app. It’s far from perfect, but the worst thing is when you, as a developer, accidentally leave some node_modules inside the synced directory. Then the whole thing literally explodes. As all of the devs know node_modules directory is the heaviest object in the universe…
When Google Drive tries to sync it we can go and grab a coffee. We can grab it from the plant in South America by swimming in a canoe through the ocean, wait until it grows, pick it, bring it to the USA or Europe or wherever we live, wash the beans, burn them, design our custom coffee machine, make a coffee, and then if we’re lucky we can go back to our computer and see the sync finished.
I tried to find a solution. I found this crazy discussion for example https://superuser.com/questions/820145/google-drive-with-a-gitignore-like-option. Poor admins build some custom scripts to make symlinks to the directories which they want to exclude from syncing. Or they remove the directories before running the syncing engine.
Therefore I’d like to pray to Google itself. Please, I beg you, oh mighty – add the exclusion mechanism to the Google Drive sync app so we can exclude the directories, files, anything, just like we can simply do it with .gitignore file. I know you’re busy, I know it might take a long time, but please. It will make the world a bit better place to live. Thanks in advance, Google 🙂
C# 6.0 introduced new operator – null conditional operator ?.
The way it works is very simple. It checks if the left part of the expression is null and if it’s not it returns the right part. Otherwise, it returns null.
Simple example:
var thisWillBeNulll = someObject.NullProperty?.NestedProperty;
var thisWilllBeNestedProperty = someObject.NotNullProperty?.NestedProperty;
Executable example:
//Rextester.Program.Main is the entry point for your code. Don't change it.
//Compiler version 4.0.30319.17929 for Microsoft (R) .NET Framework 4.5
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
namespace Rextester
{
public class Person
{
public string Name { get; set; }
}
public class Dog
{
public Person Owner { get; set; }
}
public class Program
{
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
Dog dog = new Dog();
Console.WriteLine(dog.Owner?.Name == null);
// this will print True
dog.Owner = new Person() { Name = "Fred" };
Console.WriteLine(dog.Owner?.Name);
// this will print Fred
}
}
}
The DRY principle, together with YAGNI, SOLID or KISS, is one of the most popular acronyms which shaped our way of thinking about developing software. It is simple, intuitive and easy to learn even during the early stages of education. However, the principle has been born in completely different circumstances than what we are dealing with today.
Simple idea
I’m not a historian of the software development and I’m not sure how the DRY principle has been born, but I guess it was created during procedural programming age. It stinks with a procedural way of thinking anyway.
The idea is simple. We have some code. The code should be organized. As long as we have some part of the code which repeats here and there we should create a procedure – extract this block of code, give it a name and reuse it.
Time flows
Since procedural programming things have changed. First of all the object-oriented paradigm explosion has happened. The complexity of the software has been growing. The systems for accounting, summing long rows of numbers, generating reports have been already created. The new frontier was internet browsers, instant messaging apps, trading systems for companies and snake for Nokia 3310. Except for the last one – it was quite a challenge.
The DRY principle doesn’t fit OOP as much as the procedural paradigm. Actually, if you think about it – it doesn’t fit at all.
Let’s think for a while – what happens when we try to avoid repetition in object-oriented code? First what comes to our mind is probably inheritance – the beautiful useless idea. The dog has a name, the cat has a name so let’s create a class Animal with property Name. But wait a second. Wild animals don’t have names. Let’s create WildAnimal and DomesticAnimal. Damn! – almost nobody gives names to fish…
Second popular solution for repetition problem is utils or commons.
There’s a secret rule in the software industry – every complex enough project has utils directory or class. Some of them 8k, 16k LoC.
It’s avoidable, it’s possible to properly design object-oriented software without these cancer cells of utils and disastrous inheritance. Please keep in mind anyway that both of them are the result of the DRY principle application. We tried, in the most easy, cheap way, to not repeat ourselves.
Microservices – nail in the coffin
Once upon a time I asked a colleague who worked at Amazon – the company which is a role model, a pioneer of microservice architecture – how do they organize common parts of the project, how they manage reusability, he answered:
We don’t. We do repeat. It’s cheaper and quicker at that scale of the project.
The enormous size of the systems we are developing nowadays entails a new approach and different rules. The most visible tendency recently is breaking down problems and systems into smaller ones. Actually it is one of the main techniques since the beginning of software development, but recently it becomes more important than ever before. We can spot this trend in front-end frameworks (Angular, React – componentization), as well as in back-end (microservices architecture).
To some extent, we can think of it as a proper way of object orientation, more proper than inheritance. The organisms are similar but not the same. They do not, strictly speaking, share some features. The human eye is not the same as a dog’s or hawk’s eye. Only seemingly, on the level of naming these objects, they’re the same. Implementation details differ greatly. I’m not a genetic scientist but I bet that if we cut out from human DNA the parts which we don’t share with monkeys it will not create a monkey. I guess there are many subtle differences, some small parts of genetic code, few “lines” which make a difference even if most of the code is the same.
What to do?
It seems that the DRY principle became harmful. Should we stop using it? Maybe. For sure we should use it more carefully. In many scenarios, it may bring more harm than good. In some cases repeated code can be signature of failure, in some cases, it may be the best possible solution.
Is it bad when we repeat the identical code twice? If we repeat within the same class – I guess it is; in the same module – maybe; if it’s repeated in the same project, which consists of 100k LoC, and repetition happened in different modules – maybe not.
Is partial code repetition bad? Well, maybe it’s not bad by default, but it depends. Depends on the possibility to create a proper abstraction to avoid it. Quite often we use principles very strictly. Don’t. Don’t follow these rules blindly because they’re merely suggestions.
Let’s start with a daily scrum. It should last no longer than 15 minutes. As long as the team is just a few developers big – it’s easy. But when we have 15 devs we can give everyone only one minute to speak. It’s pretty impossible. Either we will destroy the idea of the daily meeting – where the team members can properly describe what they worked on and ask for help (by forcing them to speak extremely short) either we’ll extend the time. In the team of 14 developers, I’ve seen daily scrum to grow up to 25 minutes.
Exactly the same is the situation with every other meeting. But in case of refinements or sprint review, it’s getting even worse because these meetings are naturally longer than daily scrum.
Observation 2 – meetings become full of things you don’t need to hear
As the team grows, the scope of work grows. Naturally – as in any big enough group – the subgroups form up. It can be any kind of division – front-end and back-end devs; people who work on feature A, and another group working on feature B; Java, and JavaScript programmers. When they work on the everyday tasks they almost don’t talk to each other unless they need to discuss some API or contract which is necessary for the parts of the system to communicate. But if the scrum team doesn’t split they’re forced to participate in the meetings together.
Then you find yourself in a meeting where half of the time is spent on discussing the things you don’t need to hear. You’re let’s say a JavaScript developer and last 30 minutes of a meeting was a discussion about back-end, or you’re developing database structure while implementation of the UI of the system is estimated.
Observation 3 – productivity plummets
You want to code. That’s why you became a software engineer. You like to focus, you love to create lines of instructions. This is also why, all in all, you’re getting paid. You automate processes, therefore, people don’t need to be employed to make them manually and the company is more effective. The money saved on automation goes to your pocket. Everybody is happy.
Unless you can’t code.
When the length of scrum meetings get longer it consumes your coding time. When the meetings get boring it consumes your mental energy. You become less productive. Not cool.
That’s why Scrum guide recommends a scrum team to be between 3 and 9 developers. Even if it seems difficult to divide – it’s necessary. The alternative is a small crowd of unhappy, ineffective developers.
Another meeting which could have been an email – that’s my favorite nag about a meeting hell.
You know it. You know it well. You just want to sit and code, you want to focus for an hour or two and produce some value for the company, for the customers, for the world. Then it shows up. An Outlook reminder. In 15 minutes there will be a meeting. You’re done. You don’t even try to start work anymore because you know it’s impossible to proceed. Time is too short.
The meeting takes five minutes to even begin. Joe comes from another meeting and it took longer than expected so he’s late. Jane is in the toilet. Mark is always late.
During the meeting, you listen to a lot of stuff which doesn’t bother you at all. It’s just a problem which affects two or three people out of eight or ten gathered in a tiny room with not enough air (by the way – this lack of oxygen can affect you).
Finally, you go out of the meeting and it’s lunchtime. After lunch, you’re a bit sleepy and it takes another 30 minutes until the blood will come back to your brain from the stomach.
Half of a day is gone.
Meetings are necessary. Effective organization of them is rare, however. Probably there are some atavistic mechanisms that make us prone to long pointless discussions. As far as I noticed it’s just a lack of emphasis put on the effectiveness of the process of knowledge exchange.
How can we avoid fluff? In some cases it’s tough. But more often than not we can ask ourselves some helpful questions: – does the topic require all attendants to be present at the meeting? – are we prepared for the meeting? – do we have an agenda? – is everybody interested and do they need to attend? – do we need to make a decision quickly or we can use e-mail instead of a meeting room?
Additionally, I would say that boring meetings are a soul-crushing experience. Therefore I would add a few more: – is the pace of the meeting not too slow, sleepy? – is the pace of the meeting too fast, too stressful? – aren’t we too serious? – aren’t we too much relaxed and offtopic? – do we take breaks? – don’t we have too many people in the room?
I believe that minimizing the number of meetings and effectively organizing them can be an amazing improvement in the workplace of a developer. Mental energy sucked by boring, long, nasty meetings organized in crowded rooms is the most precious asset brought by a software engineer to the company. We should take care of this thing. It creates software. It writes code. This energy runs the business. If we drain it we can have huge problems.
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