It's updates on the work front today! Stephanie was tasked with removing a six-year-old feature flag from a codebase. Joël's been doing a lot of small database migrations.
A listener question sparked today's main discussion on gerunds' interesting relationship to data modeling.
Episode 386: Value Objects Revisited: The Tally Edition (https://www.bikeshed.fm/386)
RailsConf 2017: In Relentless Pursuit of REST by Derek Prior (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HctYHe-YjnE)
REST Turns Humans Into Database Clients (https://chrislwhite.com/rest-contortion/)
Parse, don’t validate (https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-validate/)
Wikipedia Getting to Philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy)
Transcript:
JOËL: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Joël Quenneville.
STEPHANIE: And I'm Stephanie Minn. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way.
JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world?
STEPHANIE: So, this week, I've been tasked with something that I've been finding very fun, which is removing a six-year-old feature flag from the codebase that is still very much in use in the sense that it is actually a mechanism for providing customers access to a feature that had been originally launched as a beta. And that was why the feature flag was introduced.
But in the years since, you know, the business has shifted to a model where you have to pay for those features. And some customers are still hanging on to this beta feature flag that lets them get the features for free. So one of the ways that we're trying to convert those people to be paying for the feature is to, you know, gradually remove the feature flag and maybe, you know, give them a heads up that this is happening.
I'm also getting to improve the codebase with this change as well because it has really been propagating [laughs] in there. There wasn't necessarily a single, I guess, entry point for determining whether customers should get access to this feature through the flag or not. So it ended up being repeated in a bunch of different places because the feature set has grown. And so, now we have to do this check for the flag in several places, like, different pages of the application. And it's been really interesting to see just how this kind of stuff can grow and mutate over several years.
JOËL: So, if I understand correctly, there's kind of two overlapping conditions now around this feature. So you have access to it if you've either paid for the feature or if you were a beta tester.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. And the interesting thought that I had about this was it actually sounds a lot like the strangler fig pattern, which we've talked about before, where we've now introduced the new source of data that we want to be using moving forward. But we still have this, you know, old limb or branch hanging on that hasn't quite been removed or pruned off [chuckles] yet. So that's what I'm doing now.
And it's nice in the sense that I can trust that we are already sending the correct data that we want to be consuming, and it's just the cleanup part. So, in some ways, we had been in that half-step for several years, and they're now getting to the point where we can finally remove it.
JOËL: I think in kind of true strangler fig pattern, you would probably move all of your users off of that feature flag so that the people that have it active are zero, at which point it is effectively dead code, and then you can remove it.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's a great point. And we had considered doing that first, but the thing that we had kind of come away with was that removing all of those customers from that feature flag would probably require a script or, you know, updating the production data. And that seemed a bit riskier actually to us because it wasn't as reversible as a code change.
JOËL: I think you bring up a re