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Symbolic Violence Beats Lava Lamps All To Pieces
cdance writes "Traditional Lava Lamps, and of course email, are the tools of choice to notify your dev team that the build in your continuous integration system is broken. However, lava lamps, just like pink curtains and shag pile, don't really fit into the culture of many modern development teams. There is now a solution. Retaliation is a new Jenkins CI build monitor that automatically coordinates a foam missile counter-attack against the developer who breaks the build. It does this by playing a pre-programmed control sequence to a USB Foam Missile Launcher to target the offending code monkey."
They want their dot.com bubble era development culture back.
My job uses approximately the same tactics, although instead of a python script we have Dave the Project Manager, and instead of a foam missile launcher, Dave has a baseball bat. You see, unlike traditional product managers who have a background in, well, project management, Dave has a background in being a large and terrifying individual. So, our code builds every damn time.
Is this posting a sign that Slashdot has been hacked? Or perhaps it is sending apparently random information to sleeper cells? Letsee... if i try every third word... nope. hmh.
If you have a giant build, your design is not modular enough. Above some size, it's time to go to multiple intercommunicating programs.
If you have a giant build, your design is not modular enough.
That makes no sense. You can have a modular system and still make changes the require giant builds. For example, if your module is something in the base of your system it will usually require you to recompile most of the rest of the system. Being modular will not stop that because you need to make sure that what you did in that one module does not break the pieces that use it. Secondly, what you seem to be complaining about is rather that people might not be doing incremental builds using make or a make-like tool. So, yes, if you are always rebuilding the entire system for no purpose that is stupid.
We'd all have to wear plastic safety specs too...
Because I find things like this to be juvenile.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Since everybody in the group already has a networked computer, a general-purpose system capable of inflicting considerable suffering, why not take advantage of that?
A few days of being stuck using the "Penal Image"(WinME, Incredimail, Bonzibuddy, 800x600), they'll be begging for a chance to redeem themselves.
Balmer set up a similar system at MS when I worked there. Only every time you broke the build, you had to take a drink. I'm posting anonymously just in case this was in the NDA...
I believe that it wasn't in the NDA, or there have been some leaks already. Did you work there in 1999 by any chance ?
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
That launcher just looks like another small way to degrade people.
If I worked in an office that did that, I would ensure the launcher kept on having mysterious accidents that rendered it inoperable. Like somehow falling 10 stories out of an open window.
So we've got two different ways of handling errors here. Say I made a serious mistake like breaking the build that 1000 people have to work on. Company A looks into how the mistake happened and exactly what needs to be done to avoid the mistake happening again, be that changing the procedure I used (e.g. running tests), training of me and coworkers to make sure we know to follow the procedure or automating the failed step so that we can't do it wrong (e.g. have the build server run tests before checking something in). Perhaps something can be done to mitigate the seriousness if such a mistake happens in the future, such as an automatic roll-back on the server. Company B's solution, on the other hand, is to humiliate me so spectacularly that I'll try my best not to cause a problem again.
What'll really happen is that I'll try my best to ditch company B in favor of a professional setup like company A. So company B ends up with the people who can't get to a better place. Don't manage errors by humiliating whomever you think is responsible, have the whole company learn from the error instead. If one guy could make a mistake, we could ALL make that mistake on a bad day. Blaming one guy doesn't solve that, learning and preventing the mistake from happening again does.
Is it just me or did the article actually mean something? Lava lamps, dev team, missile counter-attack, USB Foam Missile, code monkey... what the fuck am I reading?
And you still need (more than ever) regular builds and test executions while you refactor it into something more modular.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"If I break the build I get a shit storm from my co-workers and getting to be known by managers as the reason why we slipped a milestone date that was arbitrarily imagined by someone that hasn't coded in 25+ years."
Then you're doing SCRUM and sprints wrong, code monkey.
This solution clearly was impossible in the "good old days." First of all, programmers once had offices with four walls and a real door. Back then, the favorite correctional action was a skunk in the desk's file drawer (yes, they had real desks, too!). Even during the era of cubicles, it would have been impractical to fire over the partitions blindly. Lastly, robotic armaments have come along way toward making corrective actions more selectively punitive.
However, this seems like a Disney version of management. Instead of foam missiles, wiring their chairs with remote controlled tasers would be far more effective. It might even become the basis for a new form of Agile programming. You will laugh at the suggestion until you read that it has been standard practice in China and India.
I suggest you get into consulting.
More probably it's his PHBs that are doing S.C.R.U.M. and sprints wrong and he therefore has no say in it. It's really sad to see all good ideas eventually get perverted by clueless MBAs and PMPs
At least that's what my hippy educators in the 70s liked to tell me. Though to render everything they told me false and irrelevant, I just need to find one example where it did. Hmm... Ah! World War 2! Suck on that, hippy educators! Perhaps you just didn't use enough violence in your solution!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You can structure your modules and your tests such that you can test them independently, using unit tests and functional tests while mocking other services. This keeps each individual build, likely to be kicked off by a change in the revision control system, to a minimum. Integration tests using all the components together can be kicked off at larger intervals (twice daily, for example). These should always pass if all the individual module tests passed. If not, then your tests are incomplete.
I'd like to print that out and put it up on my divider wall but I've already hit my limit of 3 personal non-work-related items.
Then he's doing scrum like most of the companies out there.
I've had managers scream at me because I wasn't burning down exactly 8 hours per day.
I've had managers pick arbitrary dates six months in the future as the Absolute Must Ship date, and complain when one month into that, we laid out the reasons why we didn't think we'd have all the desired features by then, demanding that we fix things so our burndown chart showed us completing on time, because obviously the problem was in the burn-down chart, not in the schedule or staffing level.
I've had managers complain when we re-scoped things after finding a problem, because it meant that the beautiful chart they'd made at the beginning of the sprint wasn't accurate anymore.
I've had managers complain that we didn't have tasks laid out in detail three months in advance.
SCRUM is great if everyone including management understands what it's about and how to do it. It's a nightmare if the guy in charge doesn't get it.
Grow a back bone! The rubbish only happens if you put up with it.
Looks like someone needs a foam missile launcher...
Carol vs. Ghost
Damn right, I was in a bubble company in 1999, we used to play Half Life deathmatch mid afternoon, go to the pub for lunch and decide not to bother going back to work. Oh happy days. I still get paid to press buttons on computers, there are no deathmatches and we try not to get TOO drunk at the pub but FFS it's just a job, it shouldn't define your existence
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.
Those modules communicate with each other. If you screw up the way they communicate, integration tests fail. That's a broken build.
Yeah, it means something gets committed to the master branch, which either prevents compilation, breaks a unit test, or breaks an integration test.
It's serious because the rest of your team is relying on that master branch being good, so they can test their own changes against it.
In theory it should almost never happen, for the reasons you're hinting at; you don't merge into the branch until you've run unit tests elsewhere.
In practice, real life gets in the way. Your unit tests weren't complete, or made some dud assumption about an interface, or whatever. CI builds your code, runs tests, alerts everyone that something's broken. You fix it. Everything's back on track.
The lava lamps / etc. are just a way to get some (hopefully good natured) taboo around merging code that breaks the build. It should motivate developers to be more careful with their tests before committing/merging.
Yeah, the Bamboo one is better IMHO cause it supports a web-cam strapped to the launcher so you can re-live the moment. https://github.com/crossroads/bamboo_punisher
So wait...we're supposed to respect your choices and their results, and therefore respect and wish to emulate you, thus making your condescension about "toys" and "scripting abilities" have bite?
Does it occur to you that there is another possibility...that you screwed up, made a lot of poor decisions, and now justify them to yourself in terms of "growing up"? That it was your party that ended, not the party?
"We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." - Joss Whedon via Angel
I'm disappointed. I was imagining a custom launcher that fires sharpened bamboo sticks. That'd be a great incentiviser.
Cool post bro, highfive \o
If you have a giant build, your design is not modular enough. Above some size, it's time to go to multiple intercommunicating programs.
I bet most giant builds aren't giant because there's actually so much building work that needs to be done; they're giant because the build system is *broken*. Can't do a proper incremental build, can't be parallelized, and so on. I once reduced a 15--20 minute build time to 0--15 seconds by fixing up the Makefile to do the right thing.
...I was clearly trolling in the post above.
They give mod points to anyone these days.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Don't fucking call random people code monkeys. Mind your fucking manners, sir.
Some of my best code has been in the small hours after drinking, must be the Balmer Peak in action. I remember in the late 90s going to a beach party once, then afterwards bashing out a bunch of cookie handling code. I bet there are tons of websites still using that today :D
If you don't risk failure you don't risk success.