How I didn’t hit the guy on the pole or the story of amazing ingenuity

In this post I will write about the importance of architectural decisions in development, application support, in a team development environment.

Self-Operating Napkin – Rube Goldberg

During my youth, I worked on an app for ordering a taxi. In the program, you could choose a pickup point, a drop point, calculate the cost of the trip, the type of tariff, and, in fact, order a taxi. I got the application at the last stage of the pre-launch, after adding several fixes, the application was released in the AppStore. Already at that stage, the whole team understood that it was implemented very poorly, design patterns were not used, all components of the system were tightly connected, in general, it could be written into one large continuous class (God object), nothing would have changed, so how classes mixed their boundaries of responsibility and, in their mass, overlapped each other in a dead cohesion. Later, the management decided to write the application from scratch, using the correct architecture, which was done and the final product was implemented by several dozen B2B clients.

However, I will describe a curious incident from past architecture, from which I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, or suddenly remember in the middle of the day and start laughing hysterically. The thing is that I could not hit the guy on the pole the first time, and this brought down most of the application, but first things first.

It was an ordinary working day, one of the customers received a task to slightly modify the application design – it is banal to move a few pixels up the icon in the center of the screen on the pickup address selection screen. Well, having professionally evaluated the task in 10 minutes, I raised the icon 20 pixels up, suspecting nothing at all, I decided to check the taxi order.

What? Does the app no ​​longer show the order button? How did it happen?

I could not believe my eyes, after raising the icon by 20 pixels, the application stopped showing the continue ordering button. Rolling back the change, I saw the button again. Something was wrong here. After spending 20 minutes in the debugger, I got a little tired of unwinding spaghetti from calls to overlapping classes, but I found that * moving the picture really changes the logic of the application *

It was all about the icon in the center – the man on the pole, when he moved the map, he jumped to animate the camera movement, this animation was followed by the disappearance of the button below. Apparently the program thought that the man shifted by 20 pixels was in a jump, so, according to internal logic, it hid the confirmation button.

How can this happen? Does * the state * of the screen depend not on the pattern of the state machine, but on the * representation * of the guy’s position on the pole?

Everything turned out to be so, every time the map was drawn, the application * visually pick * in the middle of the screen and checked what was there, if there was a man on a pole, then this means that the animation of the map shift was over and the button had to be shown. In the case when the man is not there, it means that the map is shifting, and the button must be hidden.

In the example above, everything is fine, firstly, this is an example of the Goldberg Machine (abstruse machines), secondly, an example of the developer’s unwillingness to somehow interact with other developers in the team (try to figure it out without me), thirdly, you can list all the problems by SOLID, patterns (code smell), MVC violation, and more.

Try not to do this, develop in all possible directions, help your colleagues in their work. Happy new year everyone)

Links

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rube_Goldberg_machine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID

https://refactoring.guru/refactoring/smells

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller

https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns/state