On the passage of time and learning

It’s been just over two years since I first wrote a little tool to help me visualize the relationships between objects in a particular system.

I had been working as a consultant for a couple of companies, and I found that all exhibited similar problems of using a powerful system, creating ad-hoc relationships where needed, and not fully following the inheritance and impact of these relationships when they change.

So coming and trying to first understand what was there, and then trying to untangle things to be clearer (and hopefully better), I tried to sit down and draw out in a physical space – probably a whiteboard – all of the objects, their relationships, and “who talks to whom” diagram.

Sidebar: diagrams and visualizations are awesome. A picture is many times worth a thousand words, which is why using pictures and visual representations of hard-to-perceive patterns is key to helping others understand what you may already know.

I quickly realized a few things that were problematic with this manual approach:

  1. There were too many objects and relationships to express effectively and clearly on a whiteboard.
  2. Every time something changed in the objects or their relationships, I had to modify the diagram or start over.
  3. This is probably not the last time I’m going to have this problem, and I’m getting really good at drawing boxes with arrows.

With these things in mind, I sat down and tried to reverse-engineer my own thought process. I knew what kind of visual end result I wanted, so I started by using an open source library that helps place things in relationship to other things, and then renders that as an image.

Once I was able to manually generate the image based on the input I provided, then the focus was to use dynamic input, which was the big win, as then I could point this at any input, and get a picture rendered.

Next was packaging and testing, which became harder and harder – but I kept going and eventually was happy with the results.

There have been over 750 downloads of that first version, and I’ve tweaked a few things here and there over time, but haven’t really done much to change the actual code to incorporate any further features.

“It works, I’m done.”

Looking back at the code I wrote (all told – less than 100 lines!), I realize that if I wanted to change behavior today, it’s much harder to do, as the code itself doesn’t lend itself to be changed.

I hadn’t written any testing around the code itself, only functional tests around “if I press START, do I reach END correctly?” approaches – sometimes termed “Outside-In” testing, as the test will assert that from the outside, everything looks groovy.

These tests are slower, not as comprehensive, as trying to have a test system look at a rendered image and compare it with a known “good” one isn’t trivial either. Some libraries exist, but what if I change the assumptions of what a “good” image is? Update the comparison image? Too much work, says the lazy person in me.

So the code exists, and works, and continues to function, over time.

I take a look at it recently, and realize that it’s all one big function (also known as a ‘method’). And some measurement tools out there state that the method is simply too complex.

How can it be too complex? This method is less than 70 lines of actual code, it can’t be that complex, can it?

In the time since I’ve written this code, I’ve learned a lot, heard a lot, failed a lot, and written a lot more code, and thanks to untold amounts of other people, I’ve been getting a bit better at it.

Here’s where I’ll drop in a reference to Sandi Metz, author of POODR, and more, and talk she gave earlier this year, and I didn’t see in person, only on Youtube. It’s called “All the Little Things”, in which she takes you on a journey of looking at code, refactoring and testing, and basically how to change things to make further changes easy.

It’s a load of information, and a lot of it may not make sense if you’ve never encountered these problems and ideas. But having these ideas (and other design principles and patterns) in your toolbox enable forward progress in your own understanding of how you approach solving problems is really helpful in not only solving the problem today, but helping you solve the problems you don’t even know about yet.

Now I look at that code, and say to myself, “Wow, I don’t really want to change anything in there until I have some better testing around parts of it”. This makes it harder to add anything new, since I don’t know what existing functionality I may break when adding new things.

So if you wrote some code, and let it sit for a while, and look at it a year or two later, you may find yourself shaking your head, with the “who even wrote this mess?” knowing full well that your past self did it.

Be kind to your future self, and try to make decisions today that will help your future self understand what choices you made and why you made them. It’s likely that your future self will have learned more by then and may make other decisions, but will appreciate the efforts of present self in the future.
It’s a weird kind of time-travel, and in the present, you’re trying to better your own future. (cue time paradox arguments)

Thanks for reading!