Weeknotes 53

A year ago—one week before C was born—wearing rubber gloves and a face mask, I pulled out all of our kitchen appliances and stuffed every crevice with steel wool. I covered the wool with electrical tape before carefully arranging boxes of mouse poison given to me by the council along the walls.

Last night, just as E and I were falling asleep, there was the sound of scratching mere metres from our heads. As soon as we moved to investigate, it stopped and I spent the rest of the night waiting to hear something else other than the pounding of my own heart.

With that and the new national restrictions in the UK from 5th November, my level of “cheersy-cheers” spirit is at an all-time low.

Brian David Gilbert’s “Earn $20K EVERY MONTH by being your own boss” helped a little though.

I’m working on a publishing platform that has a lot of special cases for a single publication. That publication is now being handled by another codebase so I have the opportunity to remove it and simplify a lot of the existing software. However, removing it cleanly without risking breaking other functionality has proven very difficult.

I tried a few different strategies: trying to remove all of the view-related code first then trying to come at it by removing a whole feature and all its related dependencies at a time. However, I kept coming unstuck: finding myself having deleted a lot of code but with far too many tests failing and not enough confidence I was on the right track so I’d git reset --hard and abandon the approach.

On Friday, I finally succeeded by being far more conservative in the amount I deleted at any one time. Rather than deleting an entire feature, I’d pick a small aspect of it (say, an admin-only view) and remove that, ensuring all the tests still passed before removing the next slice.

The result?

39 additions and 2,786 deletions.

Time to find some ear plugs.