"You don't use version control in REAL projects!" (Software developer war stories with Sean May)

Key Takeaways

hello everyone I'm recording this just before I go on vacation and if you're watching this you're about to watch a little summer short a little cutout from one of the live streams that has not previously been shown on YouTube have a nice summer hair ready for like going out into like the five minutes of summer that Sweden provides that's a downside of living in Sweden I'm gonna release one video in the beginning of the week this one and you're also gonna get a second one a little bit later in the week if you've got to be sort of working this summer and learning some react hooks baby you're gonna appreciate this week's sponsor it's Tyler McGinnis let me read you their pitch Tyler McCain has launched their first react course in 2016 and it's now been taken by over 80,000 students with an average rating of 4.8 out of 5 they're brand new react and react hooks courses just launched and will teach you everything you need to know about writing react in 2019 if that is something that is interesting to you use the link in the episode description when you get the course so that they know that you came from here thank you so much Tyler McGinnis now onto that clip what does my day-to-day work look like what is my tech stack or what is your favorite project you've ever worked ooh ooh so I can't necessarily speak about specific things necessarily my my day-to-day work sort of looks like whatever it needs to that there was a there was a call that I had at you know at the end of the day with somebody in another department at my company that said hey this this other highly technical individual who usually does architecture pre-sales had to be at another client can you show up two cities over at 9:00 in the morning and and number this by the way here it is the request for proposal and here is the slide deck that we're using and see what you can do to memorize that and I said of course I can I will see you at 9:30 so my day to day sort of changes based on the day the the current the current project is pretty steady it's a it's a website and I guess we're using Gatsby and a net laugh I for hosting and we're touching ghosts and and a couple of other things that we're integrating with prior to that angular I I've done trainings in angular I've done a little bit of you and then whatever the client is running so there's a client that we had that had some c-sharp c-sharp 2 or C sharp 3 I guess mobile notice 8 oh my god yeah I think that I might go to c-sharp 3 like way back in the day yep that's interesting yes it's how do you deal with when you approach like a very old code base like that like I like I I remember like one time where like I'm I'm a person who is I'm vehemently against rewrites I think that the program has reached for the rewrite the rewrite tool way too fast and just leads you into this that you where you're maintaining two code bases at the same time which is horribly expensive and could possibly not be worse than refactoring the old code base however I ran into one case they there was an absolutely mission-critical little app that process database rows and a in the inner catalog companies it was like the pipeline for like getting from order to the actual printed catalogue this was quite a while ago great it was a little binary like little binary that did this and the source code for it was lost okay but I have the binary so what I did was I just fed it like a ton of different like database rows and I just like re in G like reverse engineered it from that just figure out wrote a unit test for every single thing and then eventually like I just ran it gradually ran it against like the the output files as tests and just figure out like one error by one or until until I had to figure out it like for legacy code project it was the most fun I've ever had it was like solving some kind of obscure game problem was and like yes like gradually it's really satisfying really yep I yeah it all it all depends so some of that reverse engineering but usually when I when I hear rewrite I will frequently feel the urge to rewrite many times yes but the urge comes from usually people baking too much stuff inside of functions rather than outside of functions so if the whole system is engineered in such a way that you've got and if followed by a for loop followed by a switch followed and followed by a for loop and then you have written your code in here then when you're asked to you know modify that oh well okay I'm just gonna copy everything at at this switch case and I'm just going to move that into an if-else and and then rewrite the one line that actually changes in this if case and I've seen a few thirty thousand line long files that that go that way and it's usually at that moment where I feel I should rewrite this and then I do and it turns out that it's five hundred lines of code and thirty thousand lines of I burying the actual code like Ronan asks what do you mean by banking stuff inside of function versus outside of functions what was it like do you feel like that answered your question running or like can we elaborate more on that was that sort of what you explained not racial hmm yeah it's so it extends a little further than just logic cool so it also extends into dependency inversion in general so rather than importing your database into the file that you're using and then not being able to test the file because it only works on the production database you should expect to construct a thing which takes an instance of a database or takes a takes a repository that wraps the database so that you don't have to care that it's a database and I'm not saying that you should do this for we like to do app but when you're dealing in larger enterprise applications where you expect there are going to be a whole lot of people working in this code setting up those those boundaries where you can prove that I pass a test version of this user gator into the service that gets users and the right thing happens versus 200 people have made commits to this 30,000 line file that that calls to the production URL to get users and then transforms it by the time it gets to the react layer yeah yeah it's great uh as long as it works and then like it takes um it's very very hard to hunt down something in that yeah Oh foreplay says at work we had a large legacy job of 1.3 application that our team inherited the deployment took several hours and had to be performed during the night the way it was set up it was not possible to perform a rollback good times yeah oh I love the war stories yeah it was I I had like worked at this consulting company that intern work for a very large beverage organization and they had this this huge deployment thing that like that had in order to like ensure that nothing went wrong and it was kind of like just adding sick like security upon security upon security until it really didn't make sense so they had like a test and then they had a staging and then they are the staging to and then they had then they had production and I think there was something in between those two as well and they had somehow rationalized that there says that this was sensible and we were referring to the deployments system as launching launching the launching the space ship because there's so many insane amounts of steps and there were like there was like these F sync scripts involved and I've had to like get right fast and like wow gif deployments is such an incredible step forward to what what we used to have yep there were and I think all of this ended up speaking to my love of functional programming later down the line but there were a one company that I worked that had three major servers to serve most of the most of the world and so when it deployed it deployed through SCP they would SCP files to each one of these servers and it was to the point where you know you could copy the files from one server to the from wherever you were deploying it to each server but the server's could not under any circumstance come down because we couldn't get them to rebuild successfully and it was at that point before I even joined the company but so there's a fun bug there's a fun bug that happens when you make your server work through only copying files over onto the server which is to say that it doesn't account for any files that you have deleted Oh statefulness yes if it's anything that we have learned from like in the last its I in the last ten years is that the more state you have the the more problems you have about divorce day sure but then again if you don't have any state then our don't have now exactly you're just yeah it's your computer is just churning warm well I mean in my case the lights are giving it a run for its money yeah yeah Ronan says I may or may not have done that SP deployment process back when I was a sysadmin before I really understood anything but I mean like oh boy yeah but I mean it's fine like the industry learns I mean I like I developed things before subversion sort of was a thing like version control reach the industry like around the time when I was a like started to work in professional programming and there was also like subversion which was a huge improvement on top of what sickle sourcesafe now was just so hard like you would check files out and then nobody could move there and like touch them so you have to go over to people and ask them to um like check in there check in the files before you did things yep the earliest form of version control I used was sending out emails to say nobody else touch the index file on production I am editing it right now that's lovely we also had I had a colleague who worked at a mobile phone company that shall remain on and it was consultant there and he had had this tech tech lead there that he was interacting with and this was a tech lead so this was not like some manager person who's not like this was an engineer and this engineer told him very sternly like in a fatherly fatherly kind of fashion is that you don't use version control on real projects he considered because he could see the dark version control to be like this newfangled thing that like it was just this I'm an academic that somebody has decided it's like that people should use you for an illusion of security but in in practice it was just like this X like this extra work that didn't pay off yep so like as an industry we definitely move forward and like find things to find things to constantly make us better and I don't think that we should be ashamed of the people we are I think we should be proud of how far we have become how far we come if that's that's really it it's it's learning and sometimes it's learning through you being the person that burns your hand on the stove and sometimes it's learning through having somebody who's been there saying oh don't don't touch that that that's kind of hot or you know in in worst cases actually the one that I prefer working in these days is okay you can you can touch the stove just don't juggle the chainsaws leave that leave that to me thank you so much for watching don't forget to check out our sponsor Tyler McGinnis link in the episode description really good to react hooks course among other things you watched a little clip from a live stream if we were check out us live you can do so at which dot TV slash fun fun function we're not streaming right now but we will start doing that after my summer break so make sure you go there twitch.tv slash fun fun function and hit that little follow button so that you'll get a notification in the twitch app when we go live next time if you want to watch some more clips showing what fun fun function is about click this playlist here or if you're ready just click Subscribe here if you already sold I am mbj don't miss the clip next week