I have several 3d printing posts queued up on a every-other-day schedule. I feel I really should write some code, or something, to re-present the part of the that does code for a living.
But today was .. just an uneventful day.
- I did the weekly Status Report. I’m doing some fun stuff in there, trying to represent the flow of work in and out of the process.. when things go to test, when they go to deployment, when bugs are introduced vs discovered, etc. In color. In Excel.
- I wonder how much I would get out of marking “when bugs are introduced”. Kinda see the full cost of deploying a feature – also seeing all the bugs that might have been introduced at the same time.
- I worked on two bugs.
- The first one was a GUI thing – some stuff on the screen was flickering. Turns out, some XAML had gotten changed to {Binding … UpdateOnPropertyChange}, and the underlying property was being += ‘ed in a loop. So every time the loop ran through, it updated the UI.
- Fix #1: accumulate in a temporary variable and then assign at the end.
- Fix #2: in this minor control, turn off the automatic NotifyOfPropertyChange on every set, and provide a NotifyOfPropertyChange() method that a parent could control.. and then modify all parents to call NotifyOfPropertyChange outside of the loops that updated stuff.
- Of course I profiled it before and after. Went from long drawn out CPU hog-ness to itty bitty spikey.
- The second was a business rule implementation bug. The client has several settings for something – lets call it a light saber setting – and the settings were something like “only cut through meat”, “cut everything”, “don’t cut through living tissue”, and “don’t cut green things”. Turns out, green things needed to be excluded from one of the meat settings as well (or something like that).
- Most of the time of the fix was me asking the client, “so what you mean is this”.
- I got it wrong at first. I thought they meant the light saber dispenser setting, “only dispense to Jedi’s but also to green things”. When I fully explained what I was going to do (with screenshots!), the client realized the miscommunication and corrected me.
- Actual size of fix: less than 20 characters.
- Then I left early, and logged on at night, and did a production release in 1.5 hours.
- Backing up the Prod database, of course.
- Running database deployment scripts (I use a can-rerun-indefinitely approach with some batch scripts)
- Using Teamcity to deploy to production. Over VPN, it takes about 20 minutes. But I had to do it twice, due to a failed VPN.
- Testing the app after deployment – that the 6-7 fixes we deployed were working. I didn’t check all of them, just the ones involving database changes and settings migrations, etc.
- And the communication that the deployment happened, what to expect, for the brave soul who herds the client’s users.
Just another day. Nothing exciting, just work. A Good day.
