More whining about work.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that the previous development staff of Project A were lazy. Definitely not stupid, only people confident in their brilliance could produce such a poorly documented and nightmarish code base.
Lazy in terms of, "Hey, that's acting weird... it seems hard to figure out too. I'll blame X and the business people will live with it."
The latest example is the supposedly 'inconsistent' regression test results. When Jeff and I joined the project, we were repeatedly warned in reverent tones of the odd non-deterministic regression test. The first time the 10k+ bills in the regression suite are run, some bills fail. If you run those bills through again, they work.
On the face of it, it seems very odd. The way it was presented to us it seemed that the failing bills were random, and on re-run the identical bill would produce different results. Various things were blamed: memory leaks, buffer overrun, bad casts.
As we dug into it, it became clear that wasn't the case:
Definitely a bug in the engine. The data that's reset by the prep script shouldn't make it behave that badly.
#!/usr/bin/python
# -*- coding: latin-1 -*-
from elixir import *
from yaml import load, dump
try:
from yaml import CLoader as Loader
from yaml import CDumper as Dumper
except ImportError:
from yaml import Loader, Dumper
def _toYamlRep(ent):
"""
Given an elixir entity, query the entity's members via its __dict__
and return a dict
"""
ret = {}
for (k,v) in ent.__dict__.items():
if k.startswith('_') or k == 'row_type':
# don't print out the 'hidden' keys
continue
if v:
ret[k] = str(v)
return ret
class YamlEntity(Entity):
def toYamlRep(self):
"""
Wrap the _toYamlRep() dict in another dict, use the class' name as the header.
"""
return {self.__class__.__name__ : _toYamlRep(self) }
class Movie(YamlEntity):
title = Field(String(30))
year = Field(Integer())
description = Field(Text())
director = ManyToOne('Director')
def __repr__(self):
return '<Movie: "%s" (%d)>'%(self.title,self.year)
class Director(YamlEntity):
name = Field(String(60))
movies = OneToMany('Movie')
def __repr__(self):
return '<Director: "%s">'%(self.name)
def main():
metadata.bind = "sqlite://"
setup_all()
create_all()
rscott = Director(name="Ridley Scott")
glucas = Director(name="George Lucas")
alien = Movie(title="Alien", year=1979, director=rscott)
swars = Movie(title="Star Wars", year=1977, director=glucas)
brunner = Movie(title="Blade Runner", year=1982, director=rscott)
session.flush()
for m in Movie.query().all():
print dump(m.toYamlRep(),Dumper=Dumper,default_flow_style=False)
cleanup_all()
if __name__ == '__main__':
main()
Movie:
director: '<Director: "George Lucas">'
director_id: '2'
id: '3'
title: Star Wars
year: '1977'
Movie:
director: '<Director: "Ridley Scott">'
director_id: '1'
id: '4'
title: Alien
year: '1979'
Movie:
director: '<Director: "Ridley Scott">'
director_id: '1'
id: '5'
title: Blade Runner
year: '1982'
The admin rights have been granted.
It seems obvious now, but if you're not given a definitive answer when you ask "Doesn't Umbrella Corp already have a pool of licenses we can pull from?", keep asking.
Turns out, we had the licenses all along. SWEET ZOMBIE JESUS, that was good times.
I don't know if this is progress or not.
Further complicating matters... the process improvements Jeff and I have suggested appear to have helped us meet this month's release. The group's communication is improving, the code reviews caught some subtle problems, and it seems like meeting the deadline may not only be because of the handful of items they dropped off the release plan. And, Jeff and I are spitballing some ideas to for a unit testing framework so the developers can test their modifications without manually running SQL statements to verify the result of their changes.
It seems like we could be successful. If only we're not ground up by the monthly release chaos.
But, is it worth it? I'd hate to run away after only 2 months, but it gets very discouraging. There are at least two friends who have jobs to fill, one unknown but potentially awesome and another known and good-to-awesome.
I don't feel like I'm growing technically. But, I'm definitely growing in terms of dealing with projects, customers, and other developers onshore-and-offshore. Maybe the pain is worth it. On the plus side, Jeff and I have the complete support of the business-side to make the changes we're planning. They're suprisingly enthusiastic.
