Zander

• Polyglot. Ruby by day, statically typed by night. Remote work evangelist.

• Use vim for coding and Emacs for writing this presentation.

• <3 modal editing and longs walks through documentation.

Where I Work

• Work at a product company on team with 20 Engineers. Around 80 Engineers when including all software development teams.

• We've had our primary website since 1999 (.NET).

• Currently support two primary sites and ~ 10 secondary services.

We've got history :).

• Started in 1999 (date of first website on wayback machine)

• 2 Apps still on ruby-1.8.7.

• At least one still on rails-2.3.x.

Starts simple as an application with a few routes

Authentication

Extra Features

• Background processing

Painful Features

• Integrate RPC
• Parse complex and irregular .XLS uploads
• Parse irregular XML feeds

Add various managers/CEOs

Changing Business Goals

Introduce 50 devs

• Varying backgrounds
• Various skill levels
• Various coding patterns

Agitate for 5+ yrs

Confusing

How to make things happy?

Respect

• Searching
• Debugging
• Communication
• Testing

How to search efficiently in codebase

• the-silver-searcher, pt, ack, grep
• Fast and recursive (some by default, some with proper flags)

Know your ack

Search + Edit

• the-silver-searcher + wrapper tool called sack.

Search + Edit

• To Edit

Pry.gem

def troublesome_method
    require 'pry';binding.pry
    even_more_troublesome_variable_that_blows_up
end

pry-remote.gem

def troublesome_method_where_we_cant_see_answer
    require 'pry';binding.pry_remote
    even_more_troublesome_variable_that_blows_up
end

$ bundle exec pry-remote

Team + VCS == Sum of Knowledge

Know who's expert with what

• Who has 3+ yrs with company?
• Who knows the multidimensional Oracle DB?
• Who knows why we chose this routing scheme?
• Who knows how to navigate social dynamics/politics

Humans knowledge is important

• They'll have context that might be lost in commit
• They might have navigated that issue before

Go out of your way for people

When the devs can't speak

Code Archeology

• Who here has a shortcut in their editor for git blame?
• What about a shortcut for opening a Pivotal Story (or other project tracker)?
• Are your commits tagged with story information?

Code Archeology

• Fugitive.vim by @tpope

Code Archeology

Testing - In a Perfect World

• Unit (minitest/rspec/jasmine)
• Integration (cucumber)
• Smoke tests
• Human QA team

Testing - In the Real World

• Some unit (minitest/rspec/jasmine), sparse Integration
• Manual smoke test at the end of a change
• Human QA team

Coping Strategies

• Use VCR at app boundary for APIs that you don't control

Coping Strategies

• Mock carefully, stub even more carefully.
• Keep logic in places that can easily be tested
• Away from views.

Stubs

Coping Strategies

• Wrap tests with scaffold tests before changes
• Approvals.gem
• Possibly disposable, consider in your context.

Still Exploring

• Property based testing/generative testing with Rantly
• Ruby contracts (a pale version of Haskell function typing)

Think about how you write code

Write Once; Read Many

Write for the Maintenance

Write for the least experienced dev on team

Write for the Tired Dev

Zander Hill

{
  email: 'zander@xargs.io',
  github: 'ZPH',
  twitter: '@_ZPH',
}