Tag: GitHub

Work Days 42 & 43: Surely You Mock

I know…I’m combining TWO days in a row. In my defense, one could consider these two days to be a continuation of each other, as I’ve been in Gosu hell since yesterday. Unbeknownst to us, someone–in the interest of anonymity, we’re going to call him Earl–pushed a GUnit test (like JUnit tests, only for Gosu) that uses Easymock 4.0.1 out to the release branch. Fun fact: many of us are still on Easymock 3.1. I found this out the hard way when I needed to do a fix for the role user story, but was dead in the water when I got two compiler errors after creating my branch from the release branch.

Come to find out, this has been an ongoing drama of “Dynasty” proportions since December 5. For my younger readers, that would correspond to “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills-on-steriods” drama, like that chick screaming to the cat in all the memes.

Anyhoo…The initial alarm was raised in home office with–in the interest of anonymity we’ll call this fellow Gungho Carl. Gungho complained back on December 5 that he couldn’t compile. Gungho is actually a kickass developer of uber nerd cred, so if HE can’t compile, there’s something seriously WRONG. From there, for the next several days, there were a flurry of frantic emails back and forth with basically the known Gosu world within my company. The news eventually filtered down to our office in the sticks, and landed with my mentor. He’d only informed a few people about how to fix this (including Earl), as I don’t think he realized how many of us were still on 3.1.

Per his instructions, I updated to Easymock 4.0.1, fired up the server, and…drum roll…

I got 1,018 compiler errors!

As a temporary workaround, because I was really desperate to get my user story changes done and into GitHub, someone (The Alum) had me just modify the other guy’s GUnit test in my local machine to use a parameter in keeping with 3.1 (the test didn’t affect anything I did).

My mentor, who was NOT PLEASED with the workaround, helped me today to get updated with 4.0.1 correctly.

In other news, I was shown how to do Git commands from within Guidewire Studio! I haven’t created a branch from there yet, but I managed to add, commit, and push my changes. Very exciting.

I’m also happy to report that I just checked, and TWO of my user stories are now in the Release Path!

However, as of this writing, I still have MORE work to do on my role story. This is my favorite screw-up category called “Pam needs to learn to read.” I created my role, but apparently someone felt it needed to WORK. Go figure. To be continued tomorrow…

Work Day 37: Admin Antics…

More GitHub hell today. The good news is that I got a code review and my code was approved! The bad news is that I had to get my code to the master branch for the release, which of course I couldn’t do, as I don’t have the authority. My code reviewer moved my code to the right location. I also had to create several more files for EACH environment we are going to need to update.

THEN…as instructed, I sent an email to our Test Environment Team, providing a link and explaining that I needed them to suck up my file into their vortex and plunk it into the next applicable Environment. This, of course, couldn’t be easy. My mentor asked, “Did you open an environmental ticket?” Sure enough, by the time I got back to my desk, I had a terse email telling me that I needed to open up a ticket. I found a random ticket in the system like my request, copied the basic verbiage to my ticket, and sent it off.

THEN…come to find out, there is ANOTHER document one needs to fill out when one adds any Admin data to the system. This document, of course, didn’t exist under the release folder for us yet, so I found an old one under another release, copied the format, added my role entry, and put it out onto SharePoint for the rest of my team to use for their release updates.

I’m not entirely sure I’m done filling out documents…it’s only Wednesday. I’m taking copious notes, so that I’ll know what to do next time I have to update any application data that requires a script.

AGAIN…the actual coding part of this took maybe 10 minutes of my time. I’m pretty sure I’ve spent more time flossing my teeth…

Work Day 35 (and 36): Snowed in!

I apologize for my long absence, but we’ve been innundated with what Channel 3 is calling STORM ABEL. I’ll leave it up to your imagination to visualize the crazy weather graphics and the general hysteria of the weather people who are essentially in their element this time of year. The only thing more existing for them is hurricane season or the occasional tornado we get once in a blue moon. Instead of blogging, I’ve been spending my non-work time shoveling snow and bringing in firewood. Okay, there may have been some knitting, too…

My user story is proving to be a bit trickier than I thought. Once again, the easiest part was the CODE. Figuring out where to put the code has been a bit more difficult. This is essentially an XML script that I’m going to need to put somewhere to be picked up. For this, I had to pick an id number for the role entry that appears NOWHERE else, in any environment—production or lower (thank heaven for SQL). To test, I had to upload the XML file into my local machine—Thankfully, my mentor helped me to figure out how to do this. I was skeptical about uploading some random file into the application, but it worked! The new role was created correctly in the application and I was able to assign it to a user. Now I have to figure out how to get it into GitHub for the next step in the process. According to my mentor, this is another one of those crazy instances where I’m going to have to just directly upload the file into the script repository under the release folder, albeit as a branch.

In non-programming news, I had a lovely Thanksgiving with my family. I also made my surreptitious trip to my local yarn store to get DPN size 10 needles to work on my sweater. Due to a shocking episode of naked peer pressure, I walked out of there with 11 skeins of Universal Yarn Uptown Worsted and the pattern book to make the “Sophie’s Universe” crocheted afghan. The owner of the LYS had a beautiful floor sample out and I just lost my mind…along with a complete stranger in the store and one of my best friends, who actually DROVE to the yarn store, just to see that I got the yarn and pattern book. I believe I mumbled something about perhaps making it for someone as a present, when my friend said, “NO! You need to KEEP this one!”

Oh, yes, I also managed to finish my sheep sweater!

Work Day 34: Happy Thanksgiving!

Very exciting…I have another user story! The other developer assures me that this is a fairly easy one, although he’s very experienced, so it remains to be seen what his idea of “easy” is. I’m basically supposed to create a role for our system. He’s going to go over where I need to make the change, etc. It sounds like I’ll be updating an XML file, so that shouldn’t be too difficult.

For my tech debt story, I finally figured out why I was seeing odd updates, along with mine in GitHub. It appears I was attempting to merge to the MASTER rather than to the release branch. Thanks to the wonders of Google, I figured out how to change this in the pull request. Now the “updates” are all mine.

My blog is going to be quiet for the next week or so. I’m taking the week of Thanksgiving off. I’m probably going to take some of the time to get caught up on my Udemy course, as I really find that’s been the best resource for learning Java. When our instructor went over the examples this week, it was easy for me to grasp them, as I’d already done a lot of work with the Udemy course and Tutorialspoint, which is another great site.

Most of all, I’m probably going to make a surreptitious trip to my local yarn store to get my DPN size 10 needles and work on my sweater. I’m going to wash and block the sheep sweater so that I can show it off to my relatives at Thanksgiving. I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving!

Work Day 33: Git-in’ Trouble…again

I swear, the most difficult part about being a developer is not so much the coding, but all the other stuff. Today, I managed to merge the tech story changes correctly and iron out the discrepancies by doing a side-by-side comparison of the code as it is now vs. how it was back when my coworker did the original patch. I managed to put his code in the right areas. I then did a boatload of before and after testing to make sure it worked. Fun fact: our February branch has 50 errors when you run all the GUnit tests. Of course, some of this may be due to a lack of data for certain lines of business. Thankfully, none of these apply to my changes.

I managed to checkout the branch and push my changes to GitHub. However, THIS time, three weird updates that had NOTHING to do with my updates went along for the ride! I’m not sure WHERE these came from. They appear to be other people’s changes. I’m not sure if these were already part of the branch or what the story is. No pun intended…

On a more positive note, my new sweater is coming along. However, I may need to make a LYS run tomorrow or the next day. I’m almost done with the body and will need #10 DPNs for the sleeves.

Work Day 32: Git-in’ Trouble…

Our Continuing Ed session was awesome today! Working from home enabled me to see the presentation much better on my large monitor. We covered Java and our instructor compared Java object-oriented code with JavaScript object-oriented code. Our takeaway exercise is to add fields to both sets where the fields are missing. It’s always good to have practical exercises to work on. I took copious amounts of notes to share with a fellow student who couldn’t attend today.

In other news, I lost my mind with #%*$^*# GitHub again. They opened up the February Release branch, so yours truly followed instructions for bringing in the branch…not entirely successful. I got some ghastly error in Git Bash saying there was “no such directory.” I think it said “no such directory anywhere” as if to imply nowhere on THIS PLANET. Following the Alum’s advice, I checked out the branch from Guidewire Studio instead, which worked. I applied the patch for my first user story. Oddly, one of the gs files added for my second user story was STILL out there, even though I’d switched branches and done a pull request. I checked, and the rest of the second user story code wasn’t there—just the new gs file. As I have the patch for that one, I deleted that gs out before committing my changes to GitHub. All seemed to work out well…UNTIL…

I checked the pull request and realized that somehow the gs WAS IN THE DAMNED BRANCH. Despite deleting it, the file had managed to hitch a ride on my first story commit! I was pondering possibly wiping out everything and doing a git clone to bring in a completely fresh copy of the branch to apply the patch again, when one of my coworkers made a suggestion.

“Delete it out of GitHub.”

Heh? After having it drilled into us in training that we’re NOT supposed to do that???

“Delete it out!” He insisted. He even sent me a screenshot showing the tiny garbage can icon on the GitHub screen.

As it turns out, the system prompts you to enter a reason for your actions, and notifications go out, so there’s a trail at least.

It still felt sort of…naughty… 😈

Work Day 31: That thing from WAY back there…

Today was one of those days where I spend AGES trying to figure out where I went wrong with a GUnit test—this was the infamous “All Items” test. For some oddball reason, although the specific GUnit test I’m fixing was fine, the entire shebang had errors up the ying-yang. Basically, out of over 1000+ tests, only about 30 tests passed! I tried backing out my tech debt story code and reran the entire thing, and AGAIN, I had multiple errors.

Then I remembered. Back when we were setting up Guidewire, the Alum had me comment out some code in the build.gradle file after I’d brought in the November branch, before I fired up Guidewire (the code is apply plugin: ‘com.guidewire.cust-dist-deprecated-tasks’). Once I’d done that, I had to uncomment the code before firing up the server.

I realized that I had checked out a new branch (December) for this story. On a whim, I closed out of everything, commented out the plugin code, fired up Guidewire, and then uncommented it again before running the “All Items” test. Sure enough, that seems to have done the trick! The test without my code ran fine, albeit with 50 errors this time around (people have added tests since November). I need to now bring my code back in and run everything again, but I think I’m going to shut everything down and start anew like last time, to make sure.

As it is, I think I may need to adjust the code. For one of the jobs there have been many updates since June, and I think at least one block of the fix is a repeat of something that was added in later. I may try to run it first and then if I get errors, I’ll attempt to fix what I think is off.

Tomorrow is another Continuing Ed session with our Instructor. I’m attempting to cram in the reading from last week, review what we did, and review the info for tomorrow. Miraculously, he’s going to be going over some Java code. I’m not sure what little elf whispered in his ear to arrange this, but I’ll take it.

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 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…