The Technician

Sometimes bugs come along that require significant work to fix. Depending on what project timelines are like at the moment, sometimes fixing the bug isn’t the best option. For example, a race condition in the caching architecture causes pages to be stale. The persistent data store is correct, but the cache is not. To the person who just triggered the update, there’s a bug. The information on the public side is not in sync with the information they just entered.

So, like any other bug, a report will eventually percolate down to the dev team. People scream, fortunes are lost, the svn blame command is used, and the devs who wrote the code pee their pants. Once the chaos dies down, the actual prognosis of this issue can turn out to be extremely grim.

A shortcoming of the caching architecture shows that there’s a race condition when the system is under heavy load. In order to fix it, the dev team needs to plumb the depths of the data access layer, and probably change some parameters. But that’ll probably break everything. Everywhere. Or the layer manipulating the data could be fixed to replace the cache instead of invalidating. Except the methods to manipulate that entity live in 3 different codebases. It’ll probably break the editor. Either way, the actual solution doesn’t matter.The dev team certainly needs to do something, and it needs to be released three days ago.

The correct way to fix this issue will vary widely depending on circumstances. But in this particular case, the best answer was to not fix it, just manage it. Our team was busy, there were other projects that were more pressing. Plus the codebase was being rewritten. So instead of flogging a dead horse, a simple script was thrown together that compared the cache and the database. If they were out of sync, the cache would be cleared, and would be repopulated with the correct information the next time it was requested. Once it was implemented, the bug was still there, but the cache seemed to be up to date.

Every dev team will face bugs that have enormous costs to fix. The way to deal with these bugs will be different every time they come up. It’s important to remember that managing bugs can be almost as effective as fixing them.

It’s easy to get caught up in semantics. Figuring out the best names for variables, tables, columns, classes, etc is something that can eat up hours or even days of a development schedule. The idea is that the more precise the name, the better it is. The arguments for precision naming are many :

* Clear names help other developers read your code.
* New developers who come on will immediately understand what’s happening
* Calling well named methods of classes will read like sentence, further increasing readability.
* Clear names will be able to help developers relate things in the UI to the code.

Keep in mind, I’m not talking about naming conventions. Naming conventions are simply rules for choosing the character sequences. They don’t dictate what words you should assign to things in your code.

Whatever names developers choose, they will get strewn throughout the layers of the application. Database, table and column names will be impacted. Variables in server-side scripts. Organization of classes into folders. Javascript file names. Memcache keys. URLs. Just like sand at the beach, the labels the dev team decided on goes everywhere you can think of. Invariably, the marketing team will bound down the hall, and announce the product is being rebranded. Jobs will become Gigs. Friends will become Followers. Application code will become confusing.

New devs won’t get it anyway.

The fact of the matter is overthinking naming is a good way to get nowhere fast. Keeping it simple and just take enough time to make sure that things make sense will give devs more time to focus on important stuff. Like being able to articulate the thought process behind code.