kentcowgill.org/blog

I don't mean to make this the "Andy Lester" week, but the company I work for is in technical debt -- there's no better way to put it.

For a little introduction on the concept of technical debt, there's a nice wiki page. But what brings it home for me are the slides from Andy's infamous technical debt, which are available on his website.

So what am I griping about?

Version control.

Love it.

Hate it.

Gotta have it.

Unfortunately, it's a big undertaking.

What we currently have in place is a script that does:

It even has enough brains to accept multiple files as arguments, even if they're in separate directories, and create the backup in a given files' subdirectory. While this (kind of) works, it's a pain for "rolling back", which I just had to do due to technical problems at our other office out of state. Especially painful when there had been changes to files that haven't made it to production, but the developer (me, in this case) is blissfully unaware of said changes, so it's not clear which version to restore.

Ugh!

Similar frustration for trying to re-restore the changes for eventual re-promotion.

But moving to a real^™ version control system is a chore. Why? Because there are 5-6 years worth of these archive files that would be nice to have as version history. Altogether, there are about 99,300 files total. And the perl program I wrote to import them into our version control system³ takes an average of about 3 seconds per file⁴. My math tells me that's about 3.5 days.

³ Perforce seems to be what the company has elected to use, even though the few times I've tried it, I've hated it. Nowhere as intuitive for me to use as more reasonable (and by the way, free) version control systems such as subversion.

⁴ Pitifully slow. But since the Perforce server is a bit far topologically, speed issues are to be somewhat expected.

I keep getting reminded of the story about the broken window I read recently in a great book I've purchased called The Pragmatic Programmer.

Most recently was this set of conversations between a coworker and myself, and my manager and myself.

Coworker Y: "Kent, can you please run sudo command xyz on the production cluster?"

me: "Sure, but only if you promise to fix the race condition that causes condition X on the production cluster."

Coworker Y: "I would, but it's not on my platter."

me: "Whose platter is it on?"

Coworker Y: "Coworker Z."

me: "This has been a known issue for nearly a half a year, hasn't it?"

Coworker Y: "Actually, about 9 months."

... time passes ...

phb: "Kent, does sudo really need to be run for command xyz? Can't you just¹ do it with normal user privileges?"

me: "I assume so - they wouldn't ask me to do it otherwise, no? BTW, the cumulative time taken to run or have someone else run [sudo] command xyz every time this happens is probably much greater than just fixing the race condition that causes condition X, which as I understand has been a known issue for at least 9 months."

phb: "They tried to fix the race condition and failed. But I didn't know coworker Z had been running sudo command xyz all along, I thought he had another way to deal with it. Until he comes back from vacation, can you take care of these requests?"

me: "I'd much rather the race condition get fixed."

phb: "I agree, however coworker Z is out of the office this week and coworker Y is swamped -- we will have to wait."

me: "Coworker Z hasn't been out of the office for 9 months, though."

phb: "Coworker Z and coworker W tried a couple of times and could not get it fixed."

me: "Did they exhaust the entire technical resources of our company?"

phb: "No one really had lots of time on their hands. If coworker Z tells me again they can not fix it, I will hand it over to someone else for sure."

I really wish conversations like this didn't happen.

I really wish that more people at my job cared more about what they did.

Why did coworker Z and coworker W give up?

Why didn't they ask anyone for advice?

Sure it doesn't take much time to run sudo command xyz, but how much time is lost from breaking your concentration, switching contexts into "firefighting" mode, running the command, and trying to pick back up wherever you left off? And then what if you're so distracted by this craziness that you have to write a blog post about? How much time gets lost then?

I really wish people would care more.

¹ Andy Lester pointed me² to a great rant of his about this very phrase "can't you just...".

² And a second article linked from Andy on complexity management (I think he's on to something here)