Fixing More Code Monkey Bugs
This morning I came in and saw that we were having serious Production problems - and they were in the code, and it was effecting UAT as well. Now I'm not a prude… I get that code goes into Production with bugs - heck, I've done it, and I'll likely do it again in the next month. But I'm here to fix it, and to the best of my abilities, I test the code before I go home with a quick run. But last night was ugly.
I guess I wasn't really surprised that I had problems this morning… I was having problems last night getting a test to run. The Code Monkeys on the team have been fiddling with a lot of things - specifically the Salesforce endpoints, and while I think that's great, it's a little frustrating when there are folks trying to get things done with Salesforce, and others trying to refactor and hope it's not breaking anything.
But that was last night, and I thought I had it all behind me. But evidently not. In the refactoring, they have employed the Hashie gem, and while it's nice, it's also a little tricky. They wanted to base their conversion of our "container based objects" from a Hash to something based on the Hashie::Trash which is a transforming Hash. However, that, in turn, it turns out, is based on the Hashie::Dash - or defined Hash.
This means that if you haven't defined the possible entries for the Dash, then you can't add it. That's nice, to keep "junk" out, but if you miss one in the code, then all of a sudden, working code becomes very uncorking code all because of this restriction. I think they thought they planned for that, but they left off a critical component. A very necessary subclassed method:
def assert_property_exists!(property) unless self.class.property?(property) Thrash.property(property.to_s) end end
This code simply makes sure that if the new property isn't there, it's created. This isn't what the Hashie::Dash is all about, but it's what we needed because we're constantly adding attributes to the Merchant, and we want to avail ourselves of the mapping in the Hashie::Trash, but not the restrictions of the Hashie::Dash.
What's annoying about all this is that I'm the one finding this out.
I'm not the one championing the Hashie gem. I'm not the one working it into the code. I'm not the one writing tests for any of this. But I'm the one that picks up the pieces and fixes it and re-runs production and UAT to make sure we have something for the day.
It's hard being this guy when I'm working with a group of Code Monkeys that are as careless as they are. If I'm finding my own bugs, then that's on me. My fault - totally. But when I'm finding things that I would have checked - and they should have checked, and it's causing the project to look bad, then it's annoying. Too much of this, and I'm really getting frosted.
Unfortunately, I'm not their manager. I'm not their boss. So I can do nothing about it. Not a single, bloody, thing.