Running Tests, Fixing Issues, Moving Forward
Today I spent a lot of time with the new calculation chain reaction in the demand service trying to make sure that everything was running as it should. There were a few issues with the updates when there wasn't an updating component - like a demand set without a seasonality set to adjust it. In these cases, we just did nothing but log an error, when the right thing was to realize that a seasonal adjustment without any factors is just a no-op, and to return the original data as the "adjusted" data. Easy.
But the guy that wrote it doesn't think like that. So I had to put in functions to return the empty set if there is nothing in the database with which to adjust the data. It's hokey, but hey, this entire project is like that. I'm not saying it's not valuable in some sense, but I'm looking at this and thinking that we picked a language, and a team (including me) that has no real traction here at The Shop, for the sake of what? Exposure? Coolness? Are we really moving in this direction? Or is it just another fad to pacify the Code Monkeys that want to play with new toys? Will be be moving to the next new toy when they get bored with this one?
Anyway… I've been fixing things up, and realizing that I'm getting to be a decent clojure developer. I'm not really good - let alone really good, but it's a start, and I don't have to hit the docs every 5 mins to figure something out. It's starting to make sense, even if it isn't the way that my co-worker might like it.
Thankfully, things are really working out well. By the end of the day I had updated the code in the main pipeline app to use either form of the demand coming out of the service so that we can have a much improved demand forecasting impact in the app. Very nice to see.
I have to wait a day to put it in UAT just to make sure things have settled out on other fronts, and then we can isolate what the changes are due to this effect. But it's progress, and that's good to see.