More on Refactoring & Software Teams

I've had one of those moments where I have posted and just feel the need to elaborate on the topic, I enjoy that feeling, so here goes.

I posted about prototyping and that is such a very loaded word and indeed quite a broad subject, I'm not delving into anything specific in that field; however I am going to talk about my intent in why I enjoy revisiting, refactoring and the benefits I have found with those efforts.

First, refactoring, itself a simply enough principle, you can both simplify something and make it more readable, more maintainable, you can also refactor to take advantage of new advances from other technologies; perhaps a new library, or new framework, which achieves the same effect as your code written by your (perhaps) smaller team; and in my opinion going with a library written and peer-reviewed in use with hundreds, thousands or even millions of other users is really a boon to your assurance of its use over your own individual effort.

[Yes, writing your own can also be good].

 Second, revisiting, this is really the meat of the prior post; going back to your own code, or code in another part of a large system, write it your way, update the coding standard, conform to emerging or simply new best practices.  Doing this is really quite interesting, and you can through the magic of software do it side-by-side.

You can refactor the function "foo" with your own "bar" then simply swap the two function names and voila the original system process flow now uses your new code, and you can test it, try it and crucially roll back if you need to.

This is a great tool and the real reason I wanted to highlight the practice.

It isn't just limited to individual benefits, it can benefit team members around you, to both have the practice demonstrated to them and used as a catalyst to encourage them to engage with the code more widely; too often I see engineers rabbit hole into a single field, or become the defacto owners of only one vertical slice of a code base.

Such occurrences can lead to friction, what happens if they are absent through say illness or holiday, a problem occurring in their field becomes very important, the pressure ramps up on them, on the team and ultimately the project.  And there's no pressure value to relieve this, you rely solely, heavily, on that one person.  What happens if they do not like this work environment?  You are unable to support them!  They feel they are trapped!  There are so many negative effects from the sole-engineer/owner model that again I am beginning to touch on a whole other field of the software engineering puzzle.

So refactoring efforts to me become a way to familiarize multiple engineers into the general planform of a project, large or small, it helps each engineer support every peer in the group; they find common things to discuss, or collaborate on.

To me, working through a codebase, as a group, in cooperation is really important.

And it starts with one person in front of one screen tinkering and discovering. 

Software: A Rant About Change for Changes Sake

In software engineering I am one of those people who like to embrace change, I will in my own projects and even in professional situations (time permitting) stand up a new version of existing functionality in a side-by-side manner to try out new things, seek better solutions or performance or simply to understand how someone else's solution solved for the problem at hand.

This mentality broadly sits under the "Prototyping" method of software engineering, however, prototyping itself often says you should create a prototype in a wholly other language or platform than your target; a little like when planning to make a game in a brand new custom game engine you might want to prototype in an existing one, so benefit from both your own engineering expanding your eventual product, but building confidence and a marker post for performance & the content to which you can work.

The same is then true when I just want to elaborate on a single target piece of code and rework it.

I say all this because I like change.

What I can not abide however is change simply for changes sake, changes or reengineering something for no purpose.

The biggest villian in this space for me, sadly, has to be Microsoft with the Windows Operating system.

The only reason I even still run windows is to test games I'm working on (not even to run those games in most cases).

And today they've drawn my ire by reengineering, for no purpose to me, nor benefit to any user the Lock Screen.

You could just Windows Key and L your way to exiting to lunch or to go away securely from your desk, it's a natural reaction for me to lock the screen, even when I'm working at home!  So ubiquitous was I taught about security, through hard learned lessons and practical jokes.

So it irks me massively to return to my machine just now, find it has installed an update and now when locked I come to wake the machine it sits.... and sits... and does nothing... and nothing happens.... and you wait....

To the point I believed the machine was locked up or crashed.

When really it's opening four widgets on the lock screen.... Four..... Inane news articles which do not interest me, junk adverts and even the weather app I must have uninstalled three times on this machine, yet it returns constantly.

The delay?  Yeah, it was off loading whatever framework it needed to show these embedded widgets.... Some Javascript framework taking a gig of ram no doubt, which has taken the lock screen of instant, consistent and functional usage to a dismal mess I am going to have to disable for my own sanity.

Microsoft, just NO, stop doing this.

Why the widgets? And then you remove them, after trying to figure out what's wrong and even with the value set to "NO" do not show me these widgets it still adds another app to the list of things it can show, it's so insidious; not to mention slow.  And when you finally do disable these needless widgets?..... Oh it's still massively slow and doesn't work as it did before.

Yeah you sould press any key and wake the locked screen to give you a log-in prompt... now only escape seems to give me a log in screen.... I have no idea why that change was done, I presume whomever was tasked with this change just likes or was themselves used to using the escape key; but it's the many tiny little changes the gas lighting of "this used to work <that> way" only to find it changed - without any visual reconfiguration it just now works differently - it all just beggars belief. 

XVE: Making Meteors!!!

I've had a little bit of a roller coaster few weeks, I would recommend anyone feeling life taking them and rushing them to try and find a minute for yourself, take a breath and slowly exhale.