Code Chores: The boring part of maintaining

Last week the builds stopped running because dependencies in the ruby/jekyll package manager changed.

It's been a pain in the ass to fix (and i haven't even finished yet), probably going to have to use my Saturday to finish it.

Once upon a time I also had to patch the Muppet, butt I did so in our application code, pre-save logic.

We had bootstrapped a multitenant online food ordering system into profitability, and used the Muppet for our menu data structures.

Things got expensive when our oldest customers a) added items to their menu and then b) reordered those items before their older items.

Under the hood, the Muppet uses sequential identifiers to determine which elements are ordered where in the tree.

The problem is that there is (or was at the time I dealt with this) one tree_id sequence for the whole table, so our oldest (and most invested) customers would drag a new item to the top of their menus and then...renumber all trees between the oldest tree and the newest tree being relocated, which caused massive writes across every intervening menu item. Sequentially. From Python. In individual statements.

I wrote a dash of code that would calculate the affected number of intervening trees, and if that number exceeded some arbitrary percentage of the table size, first relocated all of the tenants trees to the end of the tree sequence, and only then performed the tree-relocation of the new item into the preexisting menu, thereby absolutely minimizing the number of updates necessary.

Several days later, at the behest of my internal demons, with my favorite CTO ever cheering me on, driven by an irrational fear of table bloat, I shipped a patch that also found gaps in the tree_id sequence large enough to accommodate relocations to implement continuous defragmentation.

This code ran performantly and untouched until we shuttered the business after $megacorp acquired it and ran it into the ground.