Episode 8: Clean Room Development

This one’s all about the music. What if you had to rewrite your software after every release?

In This Episode:

• The conceptual difficulties of other peoples' code, even when those other people are you.
• Legacy code and your own conceptual traps.
• Legacy code and demon possession.
• Legacy code and multiple personality disorder.
• What if you have to rewrite your code for each fix or deployment?
• “Write a new version of the code, minus the bug.”
• Lego oriented programming
• Binary vs texty interop
• ClassCastException vs sloppy parsers.
• “No, no. All shall match!”
• Log it and move on.
• Loosely coupled components vs statically-typed messages.
• The freedom to write crap code.
• The side-tracking concerns of the typical code review.
• “Okay, I’m having a connection.”
• Guitar!
• Writing code as performance.
• Improvisation, instruments, scores.
• Rewrite as process is kinda like jazz improvisation over a chart of chord changes, right?
• Sax might work better than a symphony orchestra when you need to improvise.
• My secret weapon is Clojure.
• Banjo!
• “And then I come in with my ukulele and just get upset.”
• Ukulele!
• Guard rail programming (driving by unit tests).
• The interface docs are the app, not the code, not the implementation.
• The transitive nature of object oriented spaghetti
• How to decouple? Look to the data.
• State data vs event data (moments lost like tears in the rain vs the eternal).
• Injecting your dependencies. Is that a euphemism?
• Turing complete config language. No!
• “All you get is English.”
• If all you have to spec components is English, components have got to be simple.
• Built-in monitoring over extensive testing, the app’s business logic is to test itself?
• Ultimately, design (the score or the changes) is king.
• Design is “how it works”.
• “I was hoping you were going to say something brilliant. Uh….”
• Nexi of information.
• What’s the difference between technical debt (bankruptcy) and not having the source code?
• “Technical debt is worse than having to rewrite from scratch every time.”
• “Whenever ‘c’ came along, I played ‘c’. Then I was silent.”
• The first thing to jettison with multiple rewrites are the pointless abstractions.
• Improvisation + experience.
• On-boarding new devs via rewriting.
• “The knife dropped itself from my hands.”
• “The code went off the deep end.”
• “We chained ourselves to the technical debt.”
• “The business didn’t let us fix it.”