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<h1>Zk | 2015-04-21-done-vs-finished</h1>
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<p>type: post
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date: 2015-04-21
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slug: done-vs-finished
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title: Done vs. Finished - On Code Reviews and Learning Languages</p>
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<hr />
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<p>As part of my yearly goals at work, I’ve been doing more and more work in Go.
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It’s a pretty fantastic language, I’ve found, and fairly easy to pick up, minus
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a few little caveats (goroutines took me a bit to wrap my head around). A lot
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of this has been taking place in a little project,
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<a href="https://github.com/juju/jujusvg">jujusvg</a>, which takes a Juju bundle and
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outputs an SVG representation of that bundle for displaying in webpages such as
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<a href="https://jujucharms.com">jujucharms.com</a>. This was a project I started on a
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sprint and have been shepherding through its growth over the last several months
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with the help of several members of our team who are more well-versed in Go than
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I am.</p>
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<p>In particular, a recent branch of mine has brought up a lot of interesting stuff
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to think about, especially when it comes to learning a new language and what it
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means to be finished.</p>
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<p>The goal with <a href="https://github.com/juju/jujusvg/pull/23">#23</a> was to allow
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embedding of charm icons in the bundle SVG so that the diagram was totally self
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contained, not requiring any requests to outside assets such as the icon SVGs
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through SVG’s <code><image></code> tag. The main benefit to this is that anyone can build
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a bundle diagram and embed it anywhere - a slideshow, a webpage, whatever -
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where it will work without network access. In addition to this, we can now do
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some checking on whether or not an icon exists, is really an SVG, and so on. In
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the case of the charm store, we can also embed icons by fetching them directly
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from GridFS, rather than over HTTP, which will be a significant speed boost.</p>
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<p>Within our projects on the Juju UI Engineering team (and, I suspect, elsewhere
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in the company), we utilize a system of reviews required to land code. In
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particular, we require at least one QA, and at least two positive reviews in
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order to land any branch. If there are any negative reviews, they must be
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addressed and received positively before the branch can land.</p>
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<p>In the case of #23, the process of reviewing stretched out over 21 days and 124
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comments, which is exceptionally long for a branch to live in review (we
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generally aim to have a branch completed - from start to reviewed to landed -
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within one day), but in this case, I think that the reviews helped me to learn
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how to be a better Go programmer, and a better programmer after all.</p>
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<p>This, I’m sorry to say, felt slightly unusual for me. I think that the industry
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of software development is strongly imbued with “guess culture”. In this
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dichotomy, social interaction between actors is divided into either “guess
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culture” or “ask culture”, which describes the ways in which the actor will act
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when confronted with a problem they do not know how to solve. In software,
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you’re expected to either a) know how to solve the problem, or b) know how to
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figure it out yourself.</p>
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<p>This was shown to me early on in an interview question:</p>
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<blockquote>
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<p>Given a private jet in a hanger, find out how much it weighs.</p>
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</blockquote>
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<p>Answers ranged from “cut it in half again and again into smaller parts until you
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can place one on a scale” as a sort of Zeno’s Paradox of plane-weighing, to
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“fill it with a known amount of jet fuel and fly it until it crashes.”</p>
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<p>The answer that the interviewer was looking for, however, was “Google it”.</p>
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<p>I think this is an interesting question when it comes to the idea of ask versus
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guess culture. On the one hand, it points to the obvious solution of “sure,
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it’s good to be able to solve a problem given limited resources, but don’t be
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afraid to just ask,” but it also highlights, in a simple-minded sort of way,
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that you should be able to sort the problem out by yourself without opening
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yourself up to criticism by asking what might be a stupid question.</p>
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<p>Counter to guess culture, though, is the concept of ask culture, wherein it’s
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acceptable to ask for help, clarification, or instruction. There’s a lot bound
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up with this, though, and the ideas of machismo so prevalent in software
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culture, as well as the idea that we should leave university with 100% of what
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we need to know in order to be successful, both of which are ludicrous when
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investigated with the least amount of scrutiny.</p>
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<p>While I scoffed at it early on, I think that Agile methodologies (we follow a
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Lean Kanban style) do a good job of subtly encouraging a shift from guess to ask
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culture within a team at the very least, and sometimes within a whole company.
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The idea behind Agile isn’t specifically to provide upper management with
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burn-down charts and instant results, but to create an environment where
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knowledge-sharing, rather than knowledge-hoarding, is the norm. A lot of the
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other aspects of Agile fall out from that: cross-training, quick turn-around,
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daily stand-ups, and so on.</p>
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<p>In the case of reviews, the requirement to get two thumbs up and address any
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concerns means that a conversation is automatically required between developers.
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I think that worked really well for us on this branch, not just because I got to
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be a better Go developer, but also because others on the team know exactly how
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to implement my proposed API changes, and get to understand just how the library
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itself works on a lower level than they might if they just looked at the
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example.go file.</p>
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<p>The only place we found ourselves stumbling happened to be purely mechanical:
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GitHub, while it’s great in a lot of respects, did not lend itself well to this
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review turn-around. Other tools, such as Rietveld, allow both inline comments
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as well as inline responses, and unified messages back and forth. With GitHub,
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I found myself having to reply to each comment left on my branch with “done” in
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order to track which I had responded to in code, which meant that all of my
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coworkers got a list of emails containing simply “done” and a link to the pull
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request. Better, I think, to have a single email sent with my replies
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addressing each comment once I pushed my subsequent branch. Again, it’s simply
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a mechanical thing, and not that tough to deal with, but I feel as though there
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are other code review tools out there that work better than GitHub’s.</p>
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<p>What it really came down to, after all of the reviews, was that I needed to be
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more than just productive in Go, I needed to be fluent. There’s a lot that can
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be said either way when it comes to coding styles, but there are some objective
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benefits to language fluency. In particular, my approach to fetching icons took
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the following path</p>
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<ol>
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<li>Fetch synchronously, one icon at a time, over HTTP in all cases.</li>
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<li>Implement <code>IconFetcher</code>s for retrieving icons how the user specifies,
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defaulting to HTTP</li>
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<li>Allow fetching icons concurrently using goroutines, using one set of channels
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for synchronization and another for errors.</li>
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<li>Allow fetching icons concurrently using goroutines and
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<a href="http://golang.org/pkg/sync/#WaitGroup">WaitGroups</a> to simplify synchronization.</li>
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<li>Since concurrency was either on or off, threads could get out of hand, so
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allow fetching icons concurrently up to a limit using
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<a href="https://godoc.org/github.com/juju/utils/parallel">github.com/juju/utils/parallel</a>,
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which vastly simplifies the code overall path of the code, abstracting out a lot
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of (but not all of - we’re not trying to be magical) the asynchronous patterns.</li>
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</ol>
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<p>Each of these iterations was shepherded along through suggestions and code
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snippets from my reviewers. The point being was that I was writing Go code in
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order to be productive while not yet being fluent. Through the help of others,
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I was able to step all the closer to Go fluency so that I could make a branch
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that did more than just get the job done by any means necessary, but also do
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what I needed to in a clean, easy to read, and efficient manner, a perfect
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example of utilizing an ask instead of a guess method. Which brings me to my
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last point: done versus finished.</p>
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<p>When I first proposed the branch, even though I proposed it as a WIP branch,
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knowing that there would be comments, it was technically done. It fetched all
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of the icons needed for a bundle, embedded them in the SVG diagram, and produced
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a valid output. However, it wasn’t <em>finished</em>.</p>
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<p>If we had wanted or needed to iterate on this branch faster than we eventually
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did, then I’m sure we could’ve landed it as-is on each go-around with a
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follow-up card created to represent future work. My activity graph on my
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profile might’ve looked a little more full, but I think that having something
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finished was much more important, for a library such as this. We didn’t want to
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leave things hanging too long and risk releasing something which wasn’t
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complete, even if it did what it said on the tin.</p>
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<p>The responses that I got on my code review were basically all about that. It
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was a little painful to have a branch lingering for 21 days, but on the other
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hand, it’s much more satisfying to land something that I’m proud of than
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something I feel more like sweeping under the rug. Through the help of Roger
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and Martin, I was able to do that. Not only was the branch more finished than
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it was simply done, I became a better developer in the process, learning more
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about what is the Go-ish thing to do specifically as well as what is a good
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CS-ish thing to do generally.</p>
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</article>
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