Guidewire – WildKnitter Codes

Updated the blog! Cue the code!

I know I haven’t been as prolific as usual lately…I blame our Agile team’s project. Normally, we deal with enhancements and fixes, which frankly I LOVE. I started out my mainframe programming life back in 1992 dealing with production and enhancements, so I’m quite comfortable “in that space” as they say in corporate-speak. However, our team has taken on a rather larger enhancement, which is frankly more of a project—they’re just not calling it that. Several agile teams and departments are involved in this. I know, in the long run, this will be good, as it involves a new integration with our system, so I’m getting to see how integrations are set up.

The bad part is that we are all working on our stories at the same time, so in the case of my current user story I’ve been having to code off to the side in a Notepad++ document, with the idea that I will be adding my function once the Util class is created. There is really no way to tell if what I’m writing will even WORK. I’m one of those people who needs those visual cues in the Guidewire Studio app (or Spring/Eclipse, if I’m coding in Java) to guide me. You know, “normal” print if everything is kosher and ANGRY RED if there’s an issue. I’m not used to coding blind. I’m sure, once I get more experience, I’ll find this easier, but right now it’s maddening. I’ve also been working on a GUnit test for this, which has been the seventh circle of hell. I think I’ve managed to find some existing GUnit tests that are close to what I’ll be needing, but AGAIN, I need to be able actually run this SOMEWHERE.

I’m also still working with the new guy. The latest thing is that I need to help him upload some Admin Scripts into GitHub for his user story…this is a clear-cut case of the blind leading the blind. I have a sneaking suspicion that my boss is suggesting I help him with all this different things as a way of getting me more familiar with different tasks. I’ve done exactly ONE of these previously, so this is going to be entertaining, to say the very least.

Thank heavens for long weekends…May you all have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend! I for one, plan to catch up on all my knitting and crocheting, which has been woefully neglected this week!

Unraveling, without becoming unraveled…

I seem to be unraveling all my previous dilemmas. That mysterious Gosu code turns out to be block code. That still means nothing to me, but now at least I know where to look in the documentation to learn more. I’m also happy to report that frantically posting my query about the damned nested if statements to the Guidewire Community site paid off. I got two suggestions, and the “.add” to an array solution worked! Why I didn’t remember this from my Java class, I don’t know, as it’s similar logic. Sometimes it’s tough to connect what you’ve learned with the current mess in front of you.

In positively JOYOUS news, that ghastly defect user story that spawned ANOTHER defect user story, has finally passed QA and it in the release queue! I suspected this might happen, as I ran a few furtive SQL queries yesterday to check was I thought might be our QA tester’s payloads to the integrated system, and they all looked good. I swear, I’m so happy I could cry…sometimes I really feel like the life of a developer is a series of roller coaster rides—devastating lows followed by meteoric highs. It’s exhausting, but I’ll still take this over being a BA any day.

The new guy got his Java quandary sorted out. He needed version 121 for our Guidewire Studio, but tech support had installed a higher version. He’s now wading through my instructions on how to copy over a database to his local machine, while also trying to figure out his on-boarding HR tasks (signing up for benefits, taking various online courses in our ethics and sensitivity training, etc.). He’s also starting his moving process this weekend, to eventually end up at our southern hub. I can’t imagine attempting to pack and move while learning the ins and outs of a new job, but he appears to be managing it. Seeing as no one is actually physically working at any of our offices at this point, it’s going to remain to be seen when he can actually darken the door of the place. I hear it’s very nice…when you can actually go inside…

Spinning up the new guy!

…and we pause here to ask, WHY ON EARTH DIDN’T MY MENTOR KILL ME WHILE HE HAD THE CHANCE???

I jest…our new developer is a seasoned Gosu developer whom we’ve evidently hired via remote control, seeing as we’re still at DEFCOM 2, virus-wise. He’s currently out in a state two time zones away, but plans to relocate to our southern office. So far, I’ve managed to help him navigate our tech support site from hell. I reassured him that, yes! This site is supposed to be an improvement over the old one! (Can you feel the sarcasm just oozing from my pores?) I got all my accesses six months ago, so natch, in that time tech support has completely changed the ordering process on the site, which makes me look like a complete moron (“Now go to ‘Security Requests’ and…NO—looks like we’re not going to be doing that! Click over here, and…NO, not THAT one, evidently…”). It’s taken two bloody days to get him completely set up.

It then has (so far), taken two days to get him set up with Gosu, because a) something ghastly happened with his Java installation, and b) he’s unfamiliar with GitHub, having worked with SVN previously, so we’ve been having a crash course in GitHub that I am completely ill-equipped to teach. I still have to go to my mentor or our team for help with the messes I get myself into with GitHub.

This has been all while attempting to navigate my latest user story, which is proving to be quite ugly. I’m not sure what spawn of Satan decided on putting those weird \s (or \r or \a — take your pick) notations in Gosu code, but honestly, if you held a loaded gun to my head I STILL can’t tell you what they are for. The best I’ve been able to figure is that they are a shortcut for arrays or views, depending on if the Moon is full or Venus is aligned with Jupiter, or Scorpio is rising. Up to this point, I’ve been able to either cut and paste blocks of this mutant script and modify it slightly or ignore it altogether. However, my current story appears to need me to use this odd code to arrive at a field in a connecting file.

Also, I have a ghastly logic issue. I can’t seem to figure out how to write something where if condition a, b, c, and/or d are true, then fire off ALL their respective error messages. If none of these are true, then go to the next function. I’ve got it working where it sees a true condition and fires off the error message—wonderful! The problem is that the different error messages need to fire off if one of these conditions is true, 2 of them are true, 3, or all 4. Right now, it sees the FIRST true condition and throws that error message, but none of the others (which are also true). I discovered this when I ran it for all 4 being true. Every single fix I do results in ugly compiling errors.

I really need to get the new guy up and running so that perhaps he can help me out with some of this stuff…or at the very least suggest a good algorithm class…

From Learning—to Showing—the Ropes!

So, another day, another WFH (working from home) adventure. Once upon a time, WFH was an exciting privilege, where you got to sip the tea that you leisurely made, ate oatmeal that DIDN’T come out of a microwave, and quietly did your work; meanwhile escaping all the chaos, gossip, and annoyance of the office. Now, it’s taken on a whole new meaning since EVERYONE is working from home, minus a few hundred at my company (“Can you hear me? You’re breaking up! I can’t see your screen. Is so-and-so joining the meeting? What was that again?”).

We have a new guy starting next week, and I’m going to have to help him get aclimated, which is going to be positively weird to do via remote control. Granted, the guy is in another state, so I would have had to work with him remotely anyway, but it’s the principle of the thing. Despite my grumbling, the exciting thing is that I’ve hit some sort of a new level in my development job. I’m actually being trusted to show a new developer the ropes! We sincerely hope I can remember how to get Guidewire Studio up and running for a brand-new person, not to mention Spring for our integration work (Java).

I’m also now being asked to do code reviews! I really didn’t think anyone would trust with that until at least my 1-year mark, but I’ve done quite a few now. It’s actually a good way to check someone else’s code and learn from it…as opposed to spending and entire DAY trying to figure out a defect found in QA (which is how I spent my entire day yesterday).

And, of course, I’ve been doing copious amounts of knitting and crocheting in our time of quarantine. I confess, the WIPs are hopelessly out of control. I’m working on:

An Annie’s Attic Crochet Striped Afghan Club project

A knitted mask, with an i-Cord from hell

A baby blanket ( you just KNOW someone is going to end this quarantine pregnant)

A Sophie’s Universe Crochet afghan (I’ll be working on this one until they put me 6-feet under)

A Mary Maxim Woodlands Striped crochet afghan

I know there’s another one, but I can’t remember it right now…

On that note, must get back to the old backlog, to see what my next adventure is!

You’re on all the TVs!

…or, my 15 minutes of fame.

A very BIZARRE thing has happened at my company in the past month. They are about to start up another Code Academy class for 2020, and they’ve just put out the notice on our Intranet site — with Yours Truly as the cover girl.

Perhaps I should back up. About a month ago, three of us alums from last year’s class were asked to come to Home Office (The Mothership) to have photos taken to shill for the new Code Academy campaign. We got down there and discovered that, far from being a few photos, this was to be a whole photo shoot! They had us walking around the building, carrying our laptops, looking like we were on our way somewhere important. We were coached, “Talk! Just like you would in any other everyday exchange!” I turned to the other two and said, “I don’t know about you, but our meetings are all Skype…we don’t walk ANYWHERE.” They has us sit at a desk, like we were working. They had us sitting around one of those collaborative tables, as if we were discussing something of great import—again, FAR from anyone’s reality. Any of my collaborations take place with people in Chennai at 8:00 am via Skype, or with people in the building at our desks, with someone inevitably teetering on one of those ridiculous padded filing cabinets that are supposed to double as a chair. We did all have fun with the photo shoot, and I was fairly certain my two much younger fellow alums were going to be the focus of the campaign.

But, noooo…

A few days ago, someone from another Agile team came up to me and announced, “We have a bet!” I looked at her…perhaps a bet over exactly when I’m going to self-implode from my ongoing GUnit testing cluster****? She got out her phone and showed me a picture she’d snapped. “Is this you? You’re on all the TVs in the building!” I looked and there was what had to be the worst picture anyone has ever taken of me, sitting at the desk pretending to work. She continued, “We were confused as to whether or not it was you, because that’s not your desk!” I raced down to the TV by the elevator and sure enough, there I was, large as life! I checked the Intranet site and there was an equally hideous picture of me with one of the alums. She, at least, looked good. I’m not sure what’s worse—that I looked every minute of my 55 years, or that they didn’t get all the detail of the hand-knit sheep sweater I was wearing—that one I knit all through Code Academy, to preserve my sanity.

Since then, I’ve had complete strangers stop me in the hallway, exclaiming, “Oh my God, it’s you! Your picture is EVERYWHERE!” The good thing about this is that I’ve also had people ask me about the Code Academy program. I’ve been able to give them an overview of the program and tell them that it was a fantastic experience, and that I’m very happy now that I’m a developer. Hopefully all this was worth it, and there will be a lot of applicants this year.

Merge and Purge!

This was one of those days where you think you know what’s going on…and then someone speaks up and all of a sudden you’re COMPLETELY at sea.

After my triumphant completion of my user story, I pushed the code to GitHub and submitted a pull request to my coworker, who is doing my code review. Life was GOOD, until he explained at our daily checkpoint that he couldn’t merge my code due to “conflicts.”

Heh? The last I’d checked, everything was fine with my code, and I was able to do a pull request. Silly me—I’d confused doing a pull request with someone actually being able to merge my code with the release branch. After the meeting, and after having given blood this morning (the vampires were merciful…I’m only a little bit dizzy and woozy this time) I checked my pull request in GitHub again. And yes…this is another instance of “Pam needs to learn to read.” Underneath that nice green “Requested” checkmark I’d been so excited to see, there was a big ugly message informing me that there were conflicts. I delved into this and realized that when I’d pushed my request, I hadn’t done a refresh from the release branch. In the meantime, between when I’d checked out the code and done my push, my other coworker had pushed HIS changes to two of the same jobs I’d modified. Thankfully, I’d saved out my changes, so I refreshed my branch with the release branch, bringing in his changes. I modified the code with my changes, retested the JUnit tests again, and then pushed the two modified files out to my branch on GitHub. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to do another pull request or what, so I’m meeting with my coworker tomorrow morning at the crack of down (yes, he’s the one in India) to get some assistance in the matter.

I hope to SOMEDAY understand GitHub…

On a more positive note, I am working on another user story. I’m very proud of myself, as initially this looked like a completely impossible change that I’d never figure out. Upon delving into the code, though, I quickly figured out that I only needed to change two classes. One change uses a series of “else if” statements, which I wasn’t quite sure of how to code—I know how to do this in JavaScript and Java, but I wasn’t sure of Gosu, and I certainly wasn’t going to ask anyone. Asking how to code an “If-Then” statement or its bastard cousin the “If-Then-Else” or the “Else-Ifs” is probably grounds for someone taking away your company-issued computer, and possibly your lunch money. All kidding aside, I was too embarrassed to ask, so I ended up scouring the code until I found a similar example and copied that format. The rest of it I relied on the Guidewire Studio hints to push me in the right direction. It really is amazing how well the application helps you out. My next task is to try to set up my GUnit tests for this.

But first I must go take some iron and go to bed…

HappyDanceHappyDanceHappyDance!!!!

I DID it!!! I finally figured out what I was doing wrong with the JUnit testing. There is a line of code at the beginning of the test for a field that says “contextData.” Initially, it appeared to be some sort of memo or reference. As I’d exhausted every other option this week, short of Voodoo chants, I checked the field again and…I was wrong! Far from being a “memo field,” the code is actually used to pull in the data elements that have been changed in the payload. So, in my instance, I needed to add Date of Birth, Loss Date, and Driver Age to this string, separated by pipes, so that these are be accounted for in the test.

As a result, I’m FINALLY returning data, and the correct data to boot! I need to write up more JUnit tests for different scenarios, but at least I now understand how these particular ones work.

I also participated in a fire drill today—okay, it was more like a full-on 5-alarm blaze. Our BA (you remember him—the poor bastard who inherited all my work when I went off to Code Academy last July) found out that one of the user stories for his other agile group tanked in regression-testing. The developer who worked on it is offshore and was one of the many who was off for Pongal. It was my boss’ idea to put me on this as a learning experience, with the other developers. We all checked different things to see why this wasn’t working. My task was to scour the past release’s code for anything to do with the logic that was broken, and then compare to see what was overlooked and/or changed by the user story code in this release.

THEN, it occurred to me…I asked our BA, “What exactly DID the error message say?” I searched our GitHub repository for the exact wording, and FOUND it! The odd error message came from one of the new Gosu rules (.gr file) the user story added. I did my best to figure out what on earth the code meant that led up to it throwing an error. The other developers had in the meantime found other odd things to do with the test environment, so hopefully between all of us the group can determine how to fix the issue.

I have to say it was very exciting to discover that I can in fact troubleshoot code I had nothing to do with writing, and understand it! This is pretty good, in that I’m hopeless at troubleshooting knitting and crocheting mistakes for people when I didn’t personally create the article.

Now back to the JUnits! I’m hoping for a peaceful Friday to complete them…

HappyDanceHappyDanceHappyDance!!!!

As a result, I’m FINALLY returning data, and the correct data to boot! I need to write up more JUnit tests for different scenarios, but at least I now understand how these particular ones work.

Now back to the JUnits! I’m hoping for a peaceful Friday to complete them…

Work Day 48: My new toy!

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it, but back when I was frantically trying to make ClaimCenter 9.0.7 work on my local machine, one of the things I had to do was to hook up my database. As I was adding in the drive path into the configuration file and the h2 jar file, I discovered something wonderful. To test the database connection, one clicks on the h2 jar file, and then clicks “Test Connection.” If “Test Successful” pops up, then you’re good. Now, you’d hit “Connect.” WELL…when I did this, a SQL window popped up, with all the data files listed, such as you’d see for the test and production Oracle environments in Oracle SQL. For hoo-has, I experimented and plugged in one of my production queries, minus the “gwcc” prefix, and IT WORKED! I now have a way other than the Gosu Scratchpad to query my local database to see what it contains! I proceeded to try all my queries and they all worked. The only ones that don’t are the integration ones, as that information wouldn’t be under this schema.

Speaking of integration, I found out that our integration repository for March won’t be out until next week. In the meantime, I’ve still been trying to familiarize myself with Spring Batch. One of my coworkers, who deserves a medal in sainthood, was trying to show me how to create JTests for my integration code change…he was saved by his ride arriving to pick him up. While it was somewhat confusing, I think I got the gist of what he was showing me, so I’m going to continue on with it tomorrow.

Work Day 47: Well, I THOUGHT I was brilliant…

Remember my great stroke of genius in discovering I’d only need to add one argument to pass to that one method to fix the driver age being passed to our other system?

There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that my mentor helped me determine the correct version of the integration repository to clone to make my changes (short answer: it doesn’t exist yet for the March release). He helped me with my Eclipse setup, so that I can eventually make my change—for now, I’m using the older repository code for this purpose. Creating a patch in Eclipse is similar to creating one in Guidewire Studio.

The bad news is that my ingenious idea to add one argument to pass into the method was a bust. I added my change in Eclipse only have have all sorts of angry little red Xs and other ugly notations pop up. Come to find out, I hadn’t thought to DEFINE the loss date field that gets passed with date of birth. Choking down my rising hysteria, I saw how date of birth was defined, and then I scoured the class until I found loss date defined somewhere else in a similar manner. I copied that code over to the code that calls the method and all the angry little squiggles went away! Whether or not this actually will work remains to be seen. Once the March repository becomes available I’m going to hook everything up and test by entering some claims into my local UI and see if they pass correctly through the integration process.

Okay, that’s how I imagine it’s going to go. I’m sure the reality is going to 12 times more complicated than that. For one thing, I have to make this change work for five different scenarios. Also, I’m casually using the expression “hook up” for a process that’s defined over 11 pages of documentation.

My poor mentor is going to deserve a medal for this…or at the very least hazard pay…