Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Day 50

Micah and I applied to speak at Rails Conf in order to begin my research. I hope we get accepted as Rails Conf is a huge conference and would be an excellent place to get my name and idea out there. There is also another conference coming up in Chicago where I will submit my proposal. This is a smaller conference, but it will have a lot of the Chicagoland software companies like Obtiva and 8th Light. Whether or not my proposals get accepted, I am excited to begin diving into this research. I thought out most of my talk for Friday, and I will begin creating the slides tomorrow morning.

At work today I began chugging through our new feature. It was quite a pain in the arse because I basically spent all my time trying to decode massive conditional statements. The code is trying to use a single query on the database to filter out a massive number of objects with very specific requirements. As a result, there are these overwhelmingly complicated conditional statements that are nested in nests of nests inside a nest cave hidden in a gap in another nest. Not only are the many levels deep, they also mix together ruby methods, railsy methodness, sql queries, and ruby methods that perform several sql queries and. Some of them are also inefficient, and could be logically reduced and simplified. I would do this, but I don't know that the algorithms have a comprehensive test set. I would make one, but I have to make my own batch of tests to finish the feature, and if I stopped what I was doing to write tests for every chunk of untested code I found, I would never get a feature done.

Once again, if you have any suggestions for my talk, I would appreciate the input.

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