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Here’s a continuation of the previous post covering day 1, this one instead on the talks I attended for Day 2 of RubyConf 2019! Headings are linked to a video of the talk.

Injecting Dependencies For Fun and Profit

Chris Hoffman discussed the basics and the benefits of dependency injection, mentioning that it’s an alternative to mocking when testing. The benefit of dependency injection is that all of the classes using dependency injection list their dependencies explicitly in the initializer. This benefits people who go to read that code later, especially new devs to the team, since all of a classes dependencies are centralized in one location. It also makes testing classes in isolation easier since test doubles of the dependencies can be passed into the classes initializer, compared to the implicit method of mocking objects which can lead to dependencies being forgotten deep in the class.

One of the interesting patterns that Chris’ company adopted (and that I don’t necessarily agree with) to manage dependencies with dependency injection in their codebase is to have a dependency god object. This object is initialized at the start of the program and contains a reference to each dependency in their system. This dependency object is then passed by reference into each classes initializer. When a class needs a dependency it refers to the dependency in the dependency god object. This appears to be a purely functional way of using dependency injection compared to the more popular solution of using globally accessible dependency objects. dry-rb‘s auto_inject is a common dependency injection library which uses the globally accessible dependency pattern.

Overall, dependency injection is a great pattern for scaling medium to large codebases and making testing components simpler.

The Fewer the Concepts, the Better the Code

David Copeland presented the idea of programming with fewer concepts for better code comprehension between many developers. This talk was a bit of a shock since it goes against many of my ideals, but I fully enjoyed challenging my beliefs on the subject. For context, David’s team was just himself and a lead with a non-computer-science background at a small company. When David’s code was reviewed by his lead, the code was critiqued to be simpler and easier to understand. Over time David figured out that using more generic programming language concepts, such as for, if, return, etc. common to most procedural programming languages was what his lead was pushing him towards.

The talk then went into an example of some code which a Rubyist would have written with each, map, implicit returns, etc. contains many more concepts that a developer would have to know about compared to the same code written with much fewer concepts. An example of the benefit of writing code to use these generic programming language concepts is that learning to use new programming languages can be much simpler since they all generally have the same shared concepts. Onboarding new developers onto the team can be much faster if the dev only has to understand a small subset of programming language features. The Go programming language was compared to this practice as it has a smaller number of concepts than other programming languages.

At the end of the talk I asked the question about whether this style of programming may outweigh benefits by making it easier to introduce more bugs. Using functional programming language features such as the Enumerable collection of functions in Ruby can make code much easier to reason about. David agreed that more bugs are definitely a possibility, but he doesn’t have anecdotal evidence from his team.

Disk is Fast, Memory is Slow. Forget all you Think you Know

Another controversial talk I wanted to challenge my beliefs with, this time challenging the principle of memory not always being faster than disk. Daniel Magliola presented this conundrum in the form of a improvement he was attempting to make. The improvement was making metrics available for his cluster of forking Unicorn processes. When using Prometheus to collect metrics from apps, it queries each app at a specific endpoint to read in the metrics and their values. The problem with forking web servers is that when the request comes in to return all of the metrics, the request is dispatched to one of the Unicorn processes, only returning that process’ metrics, not the group of forked Unicorn processes as it should.

Daniel went down the rabbit hole on this GitHub issue looking for performant ways to support metrics collection for forking webservers. With the goal of keeping the recording of metrics as close to 1 microsecond as possible, some solutions that were investigated involved storing metrics in Redis, the Ruby class PStore which transactionally stores a hash to a file, and tenderlove/mmap library to share a memory mapped hash to each process. Unfortunately none of the potential solutions could beat 1 microsecond.

The solution Daniel discovered, and expertly discussed throughout his talk was using plain old files and file locks. This solution ended up only taking ~6 microseconds per metric write and was much more reliable and simpler than dealing with mmap’ed memory, or more running infrastructure. The title of the talk was misleading, and was touched on near the end of the talk as this file-based solution benefitted from operating system optimizations made to cache writes in main memory and disk caches. According to the program the file was updated successfully to disk, with proper locking to prevent multiple writers tripping over each other, but this was all possible by the performant abstraction our modern operating systems provide us with.

Digging up Code Graves in Ruby

Noah Matisoff went into how code graves, aka dead code comes about. Oftentimes developers can be modifying existing parts of code and stop calling other pieces of code, either in the same or different file. That code may still have tests, so test code coverage metrics can’t really help here. Feature flags, where 100% of users are going through one code path and not the other are also prime candidates for code that doesn’t need to exist.

Code coverage tools can be run in production, or in development and help give a good idea of what parts of code are never reached. Static code analysis tools can also help determine if code isn’t referenced anywhere, but it is a hard problem to solve with Ruby since the language isn’t typed and is quite dynamic. Another solution to help keep dead code out of codebases was to add todos to the codebase. Todos can be setup to remind developers to remove bits of code from the codebase or perform other actions. Some automations were shown to make todos more actionable.

I attended RubyConf this year in Nashville, Tennessee with a few of my teammates from Shopify. What a great city and a great first time attending RubyConf!

I took notes on many of the talks I attended and here are the summaries for the first of the three days. Day 2 is available here. Headings that have links go to a video of the talk.

Matz Keynote – Ruby Progress Report

Matz started off the conference with his talk on the upcoming Ruby 3, talking about some upcoming features with it, and the timeline. Ruby 3 will absolutely be released at the end of 2020, removing half-baked features if necessary to keep it on track. This probably also means that if the 3×3 performance goals aren’t fully met, then it’ll still be shipped. He spent some time on talking about being a Rubyist, as the majority of attendees were new to RubyConf, encouraging people to have discussions and contribute to the future of Ruby.

Matz went into some of the new features going into Ruby 2.7 and Ruby 3, and some of the features or experiments being removed. Some of the biggest hype was around the addition of pattern matching, the just in time compiler (JIT), emojis (though Matz didn’t think so), type checking, static analysis, and an improved concurrency model via guilds (think Javascript workers) and fibers. Some features or experiments that were removed were the .: (shorthand for Object#method), the pipeline operator, deprecating automatic conversion of hash to keyword arguments. Some attendees were vocal about getting more rationale about removing these features, and Matz was more than accommodating to explain in more detail.

No Return: Beyond Transactions in Code and Life

Avdi Grimm’s talk focused on discussing the unlifelike constraints that are imposed on users when performing things online. For example, filling out a survey or form online may result in the user losing their progress if they exit their browser. In real life this doesn’t happen, so why should we constrain these transactions so much? Avdi recommends that when building out these processes, these transactions, that we should instead think of it as a narritive, one stream of information sharing that only requires the user to complete a step when it’s really necessary. Avdi related this to our code by suggesting a few concepts that can make our programs more narrative-like such as embracing state and history of data by utilizing event-sourcing/storming and temporal modelling, failing forwards in code by treating exceptions as data and expecting failures, and interdependence in code by using back pressure, and circuit breakers.

Investigative Metaprogramming

Betsy Haibel talked about an effective way of figuring out a bug during a potentially painful upgrade of their Rails app to 6.0. Through the use of metaprogramming, she was able to fix a frozen hash modification bug that would have otherwise been quite difficult to debug. She accomplished this feat by monkey patching the Hash#freeze method, saving a backtrace whenever it is called. Then in the Hash#[]= method, rescue any runtime exceptions that occur and start a debugger session. This helped her narrow down exactly where the hash was frozen earlier on in the code.

Besty then went into detail on what metaprogramming is, and how it differs from language to language. Java, for example has distinct loadtime and runtime phases when the application is starting up. Ruby, on the other hand is both loading classes and executing code at the same time since it’s all performed together during runtime.

Lastly, the talk provided a pattern for using metaprogramming to investigate bugs or other problems in code. Through reflection, recording, and reviewing, the same pattern can be applied to help debug even the most complex code. The reflection step makes up determining what part of the code early on leads to the program failing. The moment that it occurs can be found by inspecting the backtrace at that point in time. Next is the recording step where we want to patch the code that we’ve identified from the reflection step to save the backtrace. This can be done either by saving the caller to an instance variable, class variable, logging. To get a foothold into the code, the patching can be accomplished by using Module#prepend or even the TracePoint library. Lastly, reviewing is the step in which we observe an event in the system (eg. an Exception) and either pause the world or log some info for further reading. An example of this would be to put in a breakpoint or debugger statement, optionally making it a conditional breakpoint to help filter through the many occurrences.

Ruby Ate My DSL!

Daniel Azuma presented about what DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) are, the benefits of them, and how they work. One of the biggest takeaways from this talk was that DSLs are more like Domain Specific Ruby as we’re not building our own language, instead the user of these DSLs should fully expect to be able to use Ruby while using DSLs.

Daniel also went on to mention how to build your own DSL, mentioning a few gotchas as he went. One of those was that since instance_eval is used throughout implementing DSLs, that we should be aware of users clobbering existing instance variables and methods. One solution is to have a naming convention for the DSLs internal instance variables and private methods (eg. prefixing with underscore characters). Alternatively, another way of preventing this clobbering from going on is to separate the DSL objects from the implementation which operates on those objects. This then has the effect that the user of the DSL has the minimum surface area needed to set the DSL up, removing the possibility of overwriting instance variables or methods the internal DSL needs to run.

Design DSLs which look and behave like classes. Specifically, whenever blocks are used, have them map to an instance of a class. RSpec is a great example of this where describe and it calls are blocks which create instances of classes. The it call creates instances that belong to the describe instance. Where things get more interesting and lifelike is if helper methods and instance variables defined higher up in a DSL can be used further down in the DSL. This is the concept of lexical scoping.

Lastly, constants are a pain to work with in Ruby. They don’t behave as expected when using blocks and evals. Some DSLs provide alternatives to constants, for example RSpec’s let.

mruby/c: Running on Less Than 64KB RAM Microcontroller

Hitoshi HASUMI presented mruby/c, an mruby implementation focused on very resource constrained devices. Where mruby focuses on devices with 400k of memory, mruby/c is for devices with 40k of memory. Devices with this small amount of memory can be microcontrollers which are cheap to run and offer many benefits over devices which run operating systems. Some benefits are instantaneous startup and being more secure.

Hitoshi focused his talk on the work he performed building out IoT devices to monitor temperatures of ingredients at a sake brewery in Japan. These devices had a way for workers to measure temperatures, display the reading, as well as send that reading back to a server for further processing. Hitoshi made it clear that there are many different thing that could go wrong in the intense environment of a brewery. High temperatures, hardware failure, resource constraints, etc.

The latter half of the talk was focused on how mruby/c works and how to use it. mruby/c uses the same bytecode as mruby, but removes a few features that regular Ruby developers are used to having, namely: modules and the stdlib. mruby/c compiles down to C files and provides it’s own realtime operating system. Hitoshi finishes the talk with plugging a number of libraries and tools that he’s developed to help with debugging, testing, and generating code. Those being mrubyc-debugger, mrubyc-test, and mrubyc-utils, respectively.

Statistically Optimal API Timeouts

Daniel Ackerman discussed the widespread use of APIs and how timeouts for those remote requests are not being configured efficiently. He introduces the problem that timeouts should be optimized for the best user experience – the fastest response. Given a slow responding API request, we should timeout if we have high confidence that the request is taking too long. He prefixed the rest of his talk explaining that setting the timeout to the 95th percentile is a quick but accurate estimate.

Since APIs are all different, Daniel presents a mathematical proof of determining statistically optimal API request timeouts. By analyzing a histogram of the API response times, we can determine the optimal timeout that balances user experience with timing out requests. Slow API requests often mean that the service is under heavy load or not responding.

The Ultimate Guide to Ruby Timeouts was mentioned as a go-to source for configuring timeouts and knowing which exceptions are raised for many commonly used libraries. Definitely a useful resource. Daniel finished his talk with a plug to his gem rb_maxima, a library which makes it easy to use the Maxima algebraic system from Ruby.

Collective Problem Solving in Software

Jessica Kerr talked about the idea of cameratas – the concept of a group of people who discuss and influence the trends of a certain area. More formally, camerata came from the Florentine Camerata, a group of renaissance musicians and artists gathered in Florence, Italy who helped develop the genre of opera. Their work was revolutionary at the time.

Jessica then related it to the great ideas that have come out of ThoughtWorks, a London-based consulting company. Their incredible contributions over the years have included the concepts of Agile, CI, CD, and DevOps to name a few, have influenced the entire software industry and has set the bar higher.

In general, great teams make great people. Software teams are special in that they consist of the connections between the people in the team as well as the tools that the team uses. Jessica relates this to a big socio-technical system, introducing the term symmathesy to capture the idea that teams and their tools learn from each other. No one person has a full understanding of the systems they work on, therefore the more symmathesy going on in the team, the better the team and system is. This is similar to the concept of senior developers being able to understand the bigger picture when it comes to teams, tools, and people compared to new developers usually concerned about their small bit of code.

The talk was closed by encouraging dev teams to incentivize putting the team first compared to the individual, grow teams by increasing the flow of information sharing and back and forth with their tools. Lastly, great developers are symmathesized.

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Summaries of Day 2’s talks are available here