Adjustment isn’t Always an Easy Process
I've been at The Shop for a couple weeks now. I barely know how to find the bathroom (joking), and I'm finding that some days the process of acclimation is easier than others. Today has been one of those days that was harder than average. I was talking to a good friend that's still in finance and he said something that so incredibly true:
The one thing I like about finance is that it teaches urgency. Now, the average developer interprets that to mean "do the bare minimum and move on", which sucks. But for those of us that care, we learn to write great code in a short period of time. We truly deliver. My fear, in a culture like [The Shop], is that after a while, people would lose their "edge", and revert to their lackadaisical way of life.
and then went on to say:
Or, you will emerge so much stronger than the rest of them, you'll own them.
This is exactly what's happened in the jobs I've had in the past even in finance. It's so easy to work 12+ hr days, write 2000-4000 lines of code a day, and take about two projects to totally change management's impression of me from the "new guy" to the "shining star". Period. I've done it so many times, it's almost a formula to me.
But I didn't want to do it here because I didn't like how the story seems to unfold. I start to isolate myself - and management agrees: Keep him locked away and producing code! It's in their best interests, and I didn't mind the peace and quiet. Plus, it meant that I didn't have to deal with a lot of people monkeying around with my code base.
Now I don't mind real help, but if you're going to do something that's not in the design of the app - don't do it. Ask. I've written about this more times than I can remember. So I decided that this time I'm going to work hard at fitting in.
I'm not so sure I'm going to be successful.
Case in point this week: let's call it The Case of Singletons and Thread Safety.
The Case of Singletons and Thread Safety
We have a process in the current application that needs to gather some statistics on the data running through it. Like a logger, it makes good design sense to have a singleton that does this. In the same way that you need one thing controlling the output on a logger to make the output look reasonable and make sense, it makes a lot of sense to have one aggregator, and then have it be responsible for serving up those aggregated values at any time.
I suppose that it's possible to have an aggregator that is simply applied to a list of things, and gathers data from each as it visits them, but that's not the same. That visitor pattern requires that all members be in memory at once, or that there's some reference to the ones that have been processed, and those that haven't - so you don't process the same one twice.
In either case, it's a lot more difficult design to understand. While it may have fewer lines, I've found that there's a significant point of diminishing returns on the simplicity angle - and it's possible to try to simplify something too much and end up with something that's small, but far from simple.
So we have this singleton. I simply put in a simple mutex at the proper points - three, I'm pretty sure, and that would provide all the thread safety we needed. They were even scoped locks, so there was no chance of deadlocks or any other issues arising from the use of the muteness. It's simple.
But not from Steve's point of view.
Steve is a guy on the team that's a nice guy. Fun-loving and quick with a joke, he's a good person to be around to keep things from becoming too serious. At the same time he's like many coding bigots I've known in that there is only one real language, and all the rest are junk, and there's only one real OS, and the rest are junk, and so on… It's sad to see someone with such great potential limit themselves so totally in life. The minute I heard him talk about technology, he marginalized himself to me as I know he's never going to be able to think outside the box that he's voluntarily placed himself in.
So Steve didn't like muteness. Thought they made the code more difficult to read.
Now recall there are only three uses of this mutex in this one class. Three. And the entire class is less than 50 lines - including whitespace. So it's not like this is going to take a lot to understand - and they are ruby muteness, well documented in the specs.
But that was too much for Steve.
So Steve and Fred spent two on replacing the mutex with atomic references. When they started down this road, I advised them why it was the way it was, and that it was a good solution. I advised them not to mess with atomics unless it's necessary because they are difficult to get right. But they didn't listen to me.
I even asked them not to do it.
But now we have atomics in the code.
I take that back… we have use of the Atomic Reference gem in the code. Within that code, as I've read, they use muteness to control access because you can't really have atomic operations in a reference counting language - look at ARC in ObjC 2.0 - can't be done. You can't do the compare and swap at the same time as handling the reference count. Period. So you can fake it, or use muteness, but you can't do it like you can when you don't have a reference counting VM.
So what's the upshot of all this? Well… I had the mutex in there to control adding to the singleton. If they made the container atomic it has to be atomic with respect to it's contents and that's a lot different that having atomic references to the container. My belief is that the Atomic gem is doing just what I was doing, but in the gem, if it's doing it right. If not, then it's controlling access to the container and isn't properly controlling inserts and removals from the container.
In short - they have in all cases a worse implementation. But they are happy. Why? Because they got to remove three lines of code in the 75 line class.
If I were the manager, I'd have a serious heart-to-heart with them about wasting time.
But I'm not the manager. I'm trying to fit in. But this kind of stuff is very hard for me because I see them making mistakes I've told them not to. They aren't listening. I can't save them, or their project. I can only step in when it's not working to say "I told you about this, and you didn't listen. Change it back and try it again. Next time, shut up and listen!"
But I won't. Because I want to fit in.
This adjustment is hard today. I had to deal with this. I had to deal with refactoring that wasn't done right. I mean really… if you're going to refactor, then bloody well do it RIGHT! You don't have classes that are 5 lines in total. Two lines are the definition! You've got a 5 line class?! That's got to be a method or function somewhere else - I guarantee it.
Like I said… it's hard. I don't know how long I'll last. I want to last. I really do. But I don't know how long I can last in a place where there are guys like this.