Tech Talks & Good Times: Refactoring Legacy Code, Feature Flags, and More
Details
We are a new Meetup dedicated to Rubyists, and we are excited to announce our next event, hosted generously by Stitch Fix. There will be dinner and drinks, followed by three tech talks. Bike parking is available at the venue.
Schedule:
6:30 Doors open, food, networking
7:00 Christa Hartsock, "What's New in Rails 5"
Rails 5 is coming! What does it do? Does it do things? Let’s find out!
7:15 Jennifer Tu, "Replacing Legacy Code in an Agile Fashion"
Last year, I needed to replace a business-critical system that also had a dozen or two completely undocumented rules that were each independently crucial. It came with what can only charitably be called an incomplete test suite.
The end result, of course, needed to be extendable, clean code—but what would really make a successful project would be a stakeholder who’d be satisfied through the whole development process, and support future code cleanup endeavors. I needed my stakeholder to understand why we were taking the time to rewrite existing functionality, and be on board with it.
I’ll share the process principles I used to help my non-technical team members understand my technical goals, and also some software techniques for handling legacy code. These aren’t a guarantee that your stakeholder will support you or that your code will be clean, but together they can help you have a less painful experience replacing legacy code.
7:45 Linda Goldstein, "The Feature Feature"
Feature flags allow code that is not executed in production to nevertheless be deployed to production, for easier code management, release planning, and testing in any environment. In this particular case, we are using feature flags because the backend server supports an iOS app that cannot be deployed instantly but rather must go through the App Store approval process, and which some users will not update automatically at all, so there will be very old versions in the wild that we must support. Since this particular app uses a subscription model with a fairly high price and low number of users, each user is important and valuable so we are extra careful to support old app versions. We will go through every aspect of how this works, and why each powerful attribute of feature flags is useful, necessary, or terrible.
8:15-9:00 More networking, hanging out, being cool
Speakers:
Christa Hartsock is a software engineer currently helping businesses build the right thing through pair programming and test-driven development at Pivotal Labs. She spends her free time learning the theremin and petting every dog.
Jennifer Tu enjoys learning about all aspects of software development, whether it’s improving code, pairing with designers on user interviews, or something else entirely. Besides refactoring and rewriting, her most recent software interests include giving better feedback and sketchnoting. Jennifer currently writes software for doctors, patients, and everyone in between at One Medical Group.
Linda Goldstein is known on the Internet as @compiledwrong. She uses Ruby daily (but only sometimes, not routinely) while working at Breadcrumb, and spends way too much time putting debug statements in other people's open source code.
Sponsor:
Huge thanks to the team at Stitch Fix for hosting and sponsoring!
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Stitch Fix (https://www.stitchfix.com) sends you clothing and accessories, hand-picked by a personal stylist.