The Joys and Pains of Working With an Old Codebase

As presented at Boston.rb on 6.10.14

Transcript

1. The Joys and Pains of Working With An Old Codebase Gordon Diggs Boston.rb 140610
2. The Joys and Pains of Working With An Old Codebase Gordon Diggs Boston.rb 140610
3. if  total_guests  ==  150  &&  total_guests  +  1  ==  151      ...   end  
4. Outline About Me Introduction to our codebase Adding features Executing refactors Tools we use The joys
5. @gordondiggs Record Collector
6. @gordondiggs Baker / Cook
7. @gordondiggs New York City Resident
9. "I have always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable." - Dwight D. Eisenhower
10. The Codebase Ruby 2.1 Rails 2.3 Postgres, Redis, Memcached Started in 2008 60 contributors ~128k lines of application code
11. #TODO:  redo  this
12. How to add features
13. 1. Plan out the feature
14. 1. Plan out the feature Have developers involved in the planning
15. 1. Plan out the feature Have developers involved in the planning ! Let your unique development concerns be known
16. 1. Plan out the feature Have developers involved in the planning ! Let your unique development concerns be known ! Make it a conversation
17. 2. Do a technical kick-off
18. 2. Do a technical kick-off What new data models do we need? ! What needs to be refactored? ! What might the challenges be?
19. 3. Be prepared to do something else entirely
20. 4. Write lots of tests, especially for things that already exist
21. 5. Document Things
22. Build awesome things
23. #  because  the  "update_attributes!"  does  not  behave  as  expected,  we  need   this     def  update_attributes_is_broken_with_nested_attribute_validations_in_rails      ...   end  
24. How to execute refactors
25. Treat them like features
26. 1. Plan out the refactor
27. 2. Do a technical kick-off
28. 3. Write lots of tests, especially for things that already exist
29. 4. Document Things
30. Build awesome things
31. Tools we use (and love)
40. Peter Welch - Programming Sucks stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
41. The Joys
42. Get to fix lots of bugs
43. Get to fix lots of interesting bugs
44. Give time to fix the bugs
45. Treat your codebase like a campsite
46. Build awesome things
47. Thank you! @gordondiggs ! bit.ly/joys_and_pains_boston Special Thanks to: Mark Bates, Mike Bernstein, Michael Hansen, Solomon Kahn, Alan Macdougall, Aaron Quint, Todd Mazierski, Justin Searls, Stephanie Shih, Alyssa Stein