Slashdot Mirror
GitHub Open Sources Their Internal Testing Tool (thenewstack.io)
destinyland writes: Last week GitHub released a new open source tool called Scientist, a Ruby-based library they've been using in-house for several years. "It's the most terrifying moment when you flip the switch," GitHub engineer Jesse Toth told one technology reporter, who notes that the tool is targeted at developers transitioning from a legacy system. "Scientist was born when GitHub engineers needed to rewrite the permissions code — one of the most critical systems in the GitHub application." The tool measures execution duration and other metrics for both test and production code during runtime, and Toth reports that they're now also developing new versions in Node.js, C#, and .Net..
Interesting note is this: https://static2.businessinsider.com/image/56b3d2462e526543008b5049-705-529/nicole%20sanchez-diversity-training2.png. This is actually a Github company slide given during a presentation. Github views white women as privileged and barriers to advancement of "the oppressed". Your point is made.
Why is that surprising? White women aren't magically exempt from being racist, just like black men aren't exempt from being sexist.
How much whitespace is there in the codebase? Is it more than the black characters? Only black characters matter.
Evidence of this is straight from their "code of conduct": Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding:
‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you”
Refusal to explain or debate social justice concepts
Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
It's a little more than that, but not much more. They're pushing this tool hard for some reason, there was even a mention in Wired about it.
Basically, it runs two codes paths A) Legacy Code Path B) Code path replacing A. and allows for some way of recording timings on the code paths and recording the return value (or catching errors). It's a nice tool to put in place when you want to try and replace some crufty code and try and make sure you're not going to end up hosing your system with the new code.
One HUGE gotcha with this tool is that the code paths under test must remain side-effect free. Which means it's useless for testing any code that modifies your databases or modifies anything at all in your system.
Harassment includes, but is not limited to: [...] simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “hug” or “backrub”) without consent or after a request to stop
I have to admit I actually laughed irl. *hug*
-SR
I'm kind of curious why they decided to release this now instead of at some earlier point. It doesn't seem like it's a massive code base that would be perplexing and most of it looks well enough documented that there's no reason to be ashamed of the code (though I did notice a minor grammatical error in one of the files which had "alread" instead of "already" in a String literal, but hardly a big deal.) that tends to keep people from wanting to share.
I suppose if they are interested in porting it, it's a lot easier if you just open source it and allow someone else who may be interested to take on some of the work. It's well documented enough that a college student could probably do it. It might make a good project for someone interested in learning Ruby (or some other language) and getting involved in the open source community.
I'm not white so clue me in on what I missed. What privilege did the white people get? As near as I can tell, not a whole fuck of a lot if any. By grace of heritage, I was entitled to funds to help my business and scholarships as well as privileged entrance into educational facilities - simply because I was not white.
And no, for the record, I never disclose my race on any such applications. Why? Those are telling me that I need your help and that I'm unable to do so because of my genetic makeup. What privilege does a white person, in the same situation as a person who isn't, get?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."