Spent an hour today renaming env vars across three services to make them “consistent.” Broke staging in the process because one service cached the old values. Should’ve just left the mess alone — it worked fine before I touched it.
This is one of those things that break two golden rules. Minimal change, or consistency? The only further variable a most senior person considers is the brittleness of the environment and deployment process.
I feel like it depends on the project.
Typically in the ones I work on, whenever I spot an inconsistency I fix it no matter how much of a mess that causes. Yes it hurts at first, but it may hurt more down the line when the weirdnesses accumulate to the point where it impacts operations and it’ll be a much bigger problem to fix.
However, I can totally see a more chill strategy work better for a project that is mostly just relatively simple code, like perhaps some website deployments. In my opinion it depends a lot on whether the code is generally already complicated, which is when you’ll typically want to refactor earlier than later.
At a place years ago, I misspelled a word (stupid English) which made its way into the APIs our FE consumed. FE guy decided to do a quick find/replace and broke prod. He missed some files.
(One of oldest database tables also had a spelling error from the site’s first dev because English sucks)
Edit: WTAF, autocorrect?
“Let me just clean this thing aaaaaand it’s gone”
If you are doing a rename you should have it look for the new environment variable and then fall back to the old one if it’s not set. Log an error when that occurs, and then slowly go through and remove the old environment variables in your deploy code, then remove the compatibility code
The problem with renaming environment variables is that you don’t always control the environment.
- $variable1
- $othervariable
- $july2014fixvariable
- $notneeded
…and finally…
*$otherothervariable
These shall be the variable names until the heat death of the universe! Blessed be! So say we all!
I’ve not done this specifically, but I know the pain of wanting to make things neat and it breaking things. Then having to live with the unsatisfying setup instead of making everything symmetrical and scratching my brain itch.
Yes, guilty. But also no longer regretting it a year later now that there’s a clear naming scheme and structure and I can easily find what I’m looking for.
When refactoring, it always gets worse before it gets better. So, make sure to finish it so you get to the “better” state and don’t leave it at “worse”
I had a senior early on in my career who took pride in producing the smallest diff possible to solve any given ticket and I thought it was so strange – I’m already in the file, why not clean up a bit? In hindsight, they were entirely right, and I always regret doing just a little cleanup without it being strictly necessary.
You can have both. Just not in one MR. Do what is needed, push, branch off, do what is nice
Agreed.
I’m also a fan of Kent Beck’s “make the change easy, then make the easy change”.
i.e. Do one PR that changes the code’s design but not its behavior, in order to make the next feature easier to implement. Then do another PR that changes just the behavior but not the design.
This way, you get earlier feedback on refactors and you keep behavior PRs small so you reduce the likelihood of the scenario where “we really need to ship this feature but it’s tied to this massive refactor that isn’t quite right”.
(Note that this is just for the case where a feature genuinely requires a refactor. If it’s just “boy-scouting”, then order shouldn’t matter but you should still keep them separate.)
Not if your team’s policy is that every MR must be associated with a Jira ticket for a bug/feature and creating tickets for refactoring/cleanups is simply not done.
Just make the ticket. Be the change you want to see.
Or, as suggested, just attach it to the ticket you were working on like it’s an omnibus.
Devs can’t create tickets themselves either. Sneaking it with your “official” work is the only way.
Red flag right there. Devs can and should be able to make tickets.
I just tag it with the same ticket I was working on when I discovered it needed cleanup. My logic is, it IS directly related to that ticket because that’s when the file was being touched, which implies it’s time is due to clean up some of its technical debt. Nobody’s ever challenged it and I see other people doing similar things. It depends on the company culture, obviously, but it’s not necessarily a no-go.
I’ve seen that before. It’s a self-destructive policy.
Usually it happens because there were multiple instances of such changes breaking stuff. Then QA team starts asking questions why are we breaking what’s not broke. Also QA team works on Jira tickets, so if the change is not associated with relevant bug/feature then they won’t know what needs to be tested and such breakage gets discovered too late.
I’m so, so guilty of this. But that’s also because I’ve inherited a codebase that’s almost comically badly structured and every file I open is a new outrage.
“If it aint broke don’t fix it”
“If it ain’t broke, it’s about to be.”
Better to break things in staging than prod.
Yeah, that’s the silver lining I guess. Still felt dumb staring at broken builds because of a rename that nobody asked for.
