Tag: coder

Work Day 29: I’m just watching the wheels…

Sometimes, lately, I do feel like I’m living that John Lennon song…

Why on earth do people keep asking if I’m okay…if I’m adjusting to my new role…if I’m happy???

This week I’ve had, at last count, five people ask me how I’m doing. One of my BA coworkers said something to the effect of, “Oh, that’s right…you’re doing both now…” You know, in that judgmental tone of voice adopted by people who disapprove of bisexual people. I corrected her, “I’m actually NOT…I’m a developer now.” There was dead silence on the other end of the phone. “Oh…” Like I’d just told her that someone in the family died. .

I had a one-on-one with our tech lead today, and again…”How are you doing? Is there anything I can do for you?” I suspect this was a result of that crazy call yesterday when they found out that I’d run 1008 GUnit tests I didn’t need to, and was a bit fuzzy about complicated GitHub procedures. The good news is our offshore guy finished my code review and approved it, so I was able to tell her that. I also picked out another user story, which sounds ballsy, I know, but there’s a method to my madness. Our former team member partially completed it before he left and it’s a tech debt story. I figure this is a serious opportunity to learn from someone and figure out how to modify actual Gosu code at the same time—the quintessential case of “Copying off Tim’s Homework”…

My boss asked me the other day how I’m doing, but in his case I think he’s just excited for me. Also, seeing as the company has made a major investment in me, I suspect people above him desperately want to see it pay off.

My favorite was my friend at the gym. I call her “the old lady,” but she’s probably around my age. “What the hell is coding? Why do you want to do THAT? Why aren’t you just retiring?”

Honestly, am I happy? I am grateful each and every day that I no longer drive to work, sit in the car in the parking lot, and just DREAD going in the building. Every day is a new adventure. I swear, the company trained me and are paying me money to have a good time every day, solving interesting problems. It’s like an entire day of Sudoku and crosswords, only with a nifty computer that can churn through an entire suite of tests in an hour (even though I wasn’t supposed to do those).

Am I okay? I won the freakin’ LOTTERY!

Work Day 28: I wasn’t supposed to do that?

…or “When you assume…”

Our offshore developer did my code review. He got back to me with some points he wanted to explain. As it was early, our tech lead arranged a call for the three of us. May we pause to say here that going over code with other developers is WAY easier than having tall, towering arguments with six business people on whether or not they want the words “Total Cost” capitalized in a report or not.

After I explained the amount of “deletions” (my changes for the word wraps and width limits seemed to show up as deletes and adds), he walked me through creating a branch from GitHub to apply my patch. I hadn’t done this yet, as my change isn’t being released until February. Instead, I’d cloned the November Release repo to do my changes and created a patch. He explained that I could at least check out a branch for now and push my changes there, without affecting anything in the main release branch, as long as we get rid of it before the December release. That way, he can properly review everything I did. I know what you’re thinking—did you learn nothing in boot camp? Yes, we used GitHub extensively in Code Academy, but we were dealing with a master and maybe five branches, at most. The company GitHub is IMMENSE with many, many repositories for many departments, that have many branches, where you make branches from branches for user stories. You honestly need a Dramamine before you attempt to sign in to look at it.

He asked where my GUnit test and coverage report were—or at the very least the screenshots. I showed him where this was in the documentation, and he pointed out that I still needed a coverage report. Thank God I didn’t have the webcam on because I’m sure my eyes bugged out like a squirrel about to be rendered semi roadkill. He patiently explained how to create this in Guidewire—it was simply a matter of clicking an icon. My cat Jack could manage it, if he had opposable thumbs.

And THEN, he saw the dropdown where I’d run my GUnit test earlier.

“You ran…all the tests?”

I explained that I’d followed the company GitHub Wiki instructions to the letter.

“You ran ALL the tests???”

Come to find out, I was only supposed to run tests pertaining to my code.

“Is that why it took over an hour to run?” Honestly, the entire process was three hours of my life I’m never getting back again.

It gets funnier. He looked at my code again and said, “and since you only changed the pcf files, and not any classes or methods, you really didn’t need to run a GUnit test at all.” I pointed out the one class test I thought pertained, but there was no actual change to that class, and it didn’t directly affect my two pcf file sections, so it was out of scope.

We left off there, so that the poor guy (being 10 1/2 hours ahead) could go home and go to bed. I thanked him profusely and hung up. He hung up the phone and I’m sure either howled with laughter over the crazy lady who thought she had to run the ENTIRE block of 1,008 GUnit tests for two tiny list view pcf changes, or fell into a dead faint.

My boss, who’s still on a high from me doing actual work now, thought the whole thing was hilarious.

Work Day 27: Continuing Ed…

…or, attempting to remember my JavaScript.

Today we had our first in-depth continuing ed session with our Code Academy instructor. He’s going forward with more JavaScript instruction, but he’s introducing us to Object-Oriented programming concepts which we can hopefully apply to our respective language quagmires. I was skeptical at first, but JavaScript OOP does seem to be similar to Java and Gosu OOP. My only beef is that, doing this via Skype, I couldn’t see our instructor’s double-display very well on my work monitors. He was demonstrating running different jobs, which I couldn’t see, while I was frantically trying to remember HOW (I finally remembered to “NPM Install”—DUH). It looks like I’m going to have a lot of W3 School reviewing to do to fully understand everything. I may just work from home on class days from now on—I have a large monitor that SMOKES my work ones. Also, there will be less background noise to contend with. Today, near my cube there was some sort of meet-and-greet going on that was getting rather loud.

Fun fact: There IS a difference between a code inspection and a code review! The code inspection is actually a function in Guidewire (Menu—Analyze—>Inspect Code…). I did this and managed to uncover some issues that had nothing to do with my changes. One issue had to do with PCF methods that really should be classes—this is more of a tech debt issue. We won’t mention the fact that <code> in a PCF should be separate, anyway. It’s the same blasphemy as having inline code in HTML. As my elderly Uncle Jim used to say, “It just isn’t DONE!” I asked about the errors, and our Tech Lead explained that I should just include screenshots with some notes explaining my findings, and let the code reviewer determine what is and isn’t an issue. I think this is the Tech Lead equivalent of “Don’t worry your pretty little head about a thing!” Although our Tech Lead is a woman and very nice, so I’m sure she didn’t mean it like that…I think…

The good news is that my boss, who was on copy for the code review request, is ecstatic that I’ve actually done some real work, as opposed to peering at documentation, doing exercises, and falling asleep in front of Pluralsight videos.

Work Day 26: GUnit testing hell, part 2…

…but there was light at the end of the tunnel.

My mentor explained that sometimes the GUnit errors have nothing to do with one’s code change, as you’re testing the entire code base, with other people’s code changes. He had me back out my changes (luckily I’d done a patch, plus took copious notes on what I changed), rerun the GUnit test, put my changes back IN again, rerun the GUnit test AGAIN, to see if the errors are due to issues in general or due to my code changes. Why I didn’t think to do this myself, I don’t know, but that’s probably why they pay him the big bucks to be a Tech Lead. Sure enough, the errors were the SAME, so my changes didn’t cause them.

Now I just have to figure out what the difference is between a “code inspection” and a “code review.” I emailed our tech lead, asking if I needed to provide anything else in order to get a code review. Apparently, I need a code inspection before the code review. Call me silly, but I thought these were one in the same…I scoured documentation for old user stories but there is no there there. The ones I found say “Code Inspection: non-applicable.”

On a more cheery note, my name made our division Town Hall meeting! Once for having 30 years with my company, and once for graduating Code Academy, along with all my other fellow graduates. Very exciting—I can’t think I’ve EVER rated a mention at the town hall meeting. Granted, my name appeared on a PowerPoint slide, but still, it’s really exciting to be acknowledged for something for which I’ve worked hard. Several people came up to congratulate me…for the 30 years. I’m not sure why they were more impressed that I’ve survived 30 years at the company rather than having survived coding boot camp, but I thanked them.

Work Day 25: Fun with GUnit Testing

I’m in GUnit testing hell. My mentor is back. In answer to my confusion he explained that l needed to do a GUnit test, if the pcf code I changed uses Java and Gosu utility classes. It took me a good hour or so to trace through to see where these classes were—sure enough, the pcfs use several utility classes.

I’m not entirely sure I set everything up correctly for the test. All the utility classes are part of Java or Gosu “packages” which l don’t think you put under “gtest.” There was one class not in that category, which appeared to already be in the gtest path. I painstakingly followed all the directions to set up an “All Tests” GUnit run in Guidewire. There were a total of 1008 tests to run—35 failed. I’m not sure what the hell that even means. I suspect I’m going to need to meet with my mentor to figure all this out. There is some sort of mechanism to ignore certain tests, if not applicable. I’m hoping that was the issue—that I just needed to exclude certain non-applicable tests (and not that I’ve managed to screw up the entire application with my two small changes).

I also realized after the fact that I should have written a test to include that would have tested my ACTUAL change. I thought that this was an all-encompassing test, and that my change would be tested with everything else by osmosis or something. If you held a loaded gun at my head, I couldn’t begin to figure out how to write one. I looked at one of the gtest files and it was so confusing I almost fell into a dead faint.

I have this horrible feeling that figuring this out is going to involve another Pluralsight video…

Work Day 24: I think I can…I think I can…

Well, Friday I managed to complete what I can for unit testing with the local machine data I have. The good news is that I had data for two lines of business that are very different, so it was a good test. Now I just have to figure out if I need to do a GUnit test for this, too, and when I’ll need to have a code review done. I’m going to have to wait for the January branch to open up before I add my changes officially. I swear, trying to figure out all this procedural stuff is WAY more complicated than the actual change was! My mentor is going to be back Monday, so I can bend his ear then. I’ve been looking at the backlog again, and I think I’ve pinpointed another story that’s similar to this one that I might be able to pull off…

Also, our continuing ed sessions with our instructor begin in earnest on Wednesday. I’m going to have to go over the repo we’ll be using.

It’s a beautiful thing…I don’t dread Mondays anymore!

On a crafting note, in addition to the new sweater project, I’ve lost my mind and joined the Annie’s Attic “Striped Crochet Afghan Club.” You receive enough yarn and a pattern each month to crochet three stripes of an afghan. At the end of the year, you end up with the final product. I’m thinking this will make a nice present for someone. It’s not taking me terribly long to do these…I’m tempted to search my stash for some spare yarn, so that I can have two of these projects going simultaneously.

Of course, I might want to see how much homework I’ll be getting on Wednesday before I decide anything…

Work Day 23: Holy Cow…It WORKS!

This morning, after peering at files, searching for fo:table-layout=“auto”, tracing through all our code to see how a PDF export is triggered, scouring for ANY reference to Apache FOP (fun fact: FOP stands for Formatting Objects Processor) errors, I did a Google search on the specific error again and hit upon a reference about the columns widths needing to be specified. I check the two grids and THAT WAS THE DIFFERENCE. The grid that worked for the PDF export had column widths specified. The other grid had some specified, but not all. Once I added column widths and wrapLabel=“true” the PDF generated!

Now I just have to figure out how to unit-test. I did one test for one type of business and everything worked out perfectly. I’m having a devil of a time trying to test other business types due to the test data on my local machine being LAME. No other business type appears to have fully-fleshed-out claims with reserves and payment transactions to test for my change. If I could figure out how to query the db files for my local machine, I could get a better idea of what data is actually available.

The Alum suggested perhaps creating a “patch” for my coding changes, and then trying to figure out how to connect to one of the lower environments, employing my patch. I was confused back at “patch,” never mind the rest of that sentence.

And don’t even MENTION that dreaded “GUnit” test…

On a non-coding note, I’ve begun casting on for my new sweater! I still have to wash and block the sheep sweater I’ve been working on all summer. It’s probably going to be next Spring before I finish the new sweater, but at least it will be a nice, easy project to do during my continuing coding education saga.

Work Day 22: Day 2 of the “simple” story…

The next time I say that a user story is easy and a slam-dunk, someone tell me to shut up…

I’ve managed to get everything to work except for the PDF export for one of the grids. Weirdly, the seemingly wider PDF export is fine. The shorter one is still throwing a damn Apache FOP error. I had the Alum help me for two hours, and neither of us could make a dent in the issue. We even tried getting rid of a field, and even THAT didn’t work. I did google the error, and there are some suggestions online on how to deal with similar issues. However, I can’t figure out WHERE you’d plug in the code. I could just post my issue on one of the sites. My mentor is out until next Monday, or I would have asked him.

Thankfully, this user story is slated for the January release, so I still have plenty of time to figure it out.

Also, not to be too Pollyanna, but the other good news is that, in the process, the Alum showed me a lot of tricks to using Guidewire Studio that I hadn’t known. She showed me how to detach the debugging screen from the main window, so that you can a) get a larger view, and b) watch what’s going on as you do changes. Also, I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to do a global search (tiny magnifying glass icon at the top right of the screen—DUH). The most valuable thing I learned was that if you click CTRL and then click on anything in the pcf code, you’re brought right to the underlying Gosu code!

Work Day 21: Fitting a square peg…

I’m happy to report that I’ve just about figured out the fix for my user story…okay, almost. There is a SLIGHT issue with the export to a PDF. The Excel exports are fine, but I’m getting big ugly errors for the PDF export. I suspect it’s due to the existing PDF already having entirely too many fields on the page, and now I’m plopping in one more field. Either I’m going to have to experiment with narrowing the fields in the pcf, or we may need to go to Option B—jettisoning an existing, less important field. I tried to see if l could modify the one PDF, perhaps to make a smaller font, but the configurations appear to be such that a change to one would constitute a change to ALL the PDF exports for the application, period. As much as I’d love to think I’m that frightfully important, the rest of the building (and all the offices countrywide) would probably prefer their PDFs to be a font size that doesn’t require a magnifying glass to make out the payment information.

My mentor is still out, but I’m going to consult with The Alum tomorrow to see if she has any insight into this issue. Perhaps there’s something I’m missing.

Work Day 20: I got a live one…

After an hour of falling asleep to yet another Java video, I’d had it. I decided to check our agile backlog for user stories that I might be able to manage. Several stories down, I FOUND ONE. It’s a very simple story where one needs to add “Invoice Received Date” to the payment transaction screen. I also have to make sure a person can download this field with all the other fields in an Excel file and in a pdf (which may be trickier), but it looks, overall, like a simple enhancement. I checked with our product owner, and she’s good with the fact that this might take me a while, seeing as it will be my first story. The thing has been out on the backlog for 95 days, so it’s not like anyone has been screaming for it. I know this sounds confusing, seeing as I said “agile”. We actually work Kanban, so I don’t have to have this done for a sprint. I will, however, have to keep an eye on our release dates.

I’m just so thrilled to finally have some real work to do!