Wednesday, May 8

[soid]

 Woke up at 6:20 without alarm. I couldn’t sleep more. Coffee, egg salad sandwich, Omega-3. Easy morning. No L-Carnitine; no workout today, so no need for L-Carnitine. Then scribbled something in the notebook, read a few pages, and I don’t know what else I had done, but it was 8:30 already.

The train around 8:40 was quite crowded. I didn’t even sit after the 96th. Then around 72nd I crashed on the chair and read the Polish novel. A little delay, and I was late for the standup at 9:30. I lost track of time: just kept reading, and then realized I was late.

The standup was lively – everyone discussing something, engaging, not like it was on Monday. The news was that the diversity team will be reviewing our ban on the number of countries for SMS login. We’ll see what they say. Of course, it rings a bell when we say we just banned a bunch of African and East Asian countries.

Then Will was asking me to make sure I came to the standups. Is it my second or third time that I’m late? He offered to move the standup later or earlier (so I could call from home before going to the office). I said I just needed to adjust to my commute, and that I didn’t expect a delay today, but I should plan for it. So, yeah, I should plan to come maybe 20 mins before the standup. 

Then pretty much all day I was planning my email receipts project. It’s getting surprisingly heavier than I expected. We have four different databases across AWS and Google Cloud, and a React Native app that I barely understand how it’s working. So, there will be some learning curve. I suspect I should learn React Native. I asked Will – he said it’s up to me if I wanna learn it. I’m not very passionate about it; but I think it’s good to understand what’s going on there on the client.

I asked Abhi about his emacs setup: I was surprised – for years I haven’t seen people that use vim or emacs so heavily like it was an IDE. Turns out he’s doing pretty much everything in emacs. Jumping between references and all that, of course, but also notes management that can link across pieces of code (called org-mode), git management including code reviews (called Magit). Even ChatGPT is just another emacs buffer there. And CoPilot is there to help too, with its config in Lisp. So cool!

Ah, and I learned that some people get pissed if I wash my mug in the kitchen sink and don’t wipe the splashes with a paper towel. Why would I do that? Should we not save the trees after all? I will think about it.

Back home by 7. Sleepy as if it was Thursday, but it’s only Wednesday. Finished "Perfect Days" in the evening. We managed to split this movie into three parts. Beautiful cinematography, but I didn't understand what the authors tried to say. Mistake splitting this beautiful movie into three parts. Bed by 11.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

emaxi is cool etc, but how do they do big refactorings? Usually emacs people don't answer such questions, because they don't know what is it, big refactoring.

Funny about diversity team forcing wasting money on spammers. Including probably Nigerian spam.

[soid]

Ah, refactoring, good call! I should ask. I suspect he'd just go to Intellij for refactoring. It's not a religion – it's okay to use another program, you know. I wonder if emacs can do some simple refactoring like renaming. I actually rarely do anything beyond renaming. Is there any other useful refactorings? I should probably learn them.

The diversity team isn't forcing us yet - they want to review what we're doing.

[juan_gandhi]

Hmm, an interesting approach. Makes sense, combine tools at will.

[ionial]

how big is "big" refactoring?

[juan_gandhi]

Global over a bunch of files.

[ionial]

I already forgot -- does IntelliJ refactoring support function rename with argument reordering?

Anyway as soon as you decide that the argument type changes, it is better to go manually over all the places your function is called to validate that you don't rely on some nasty casting.

For me the most useful refactoring tool that is beyond rename is "extract method" and its weaker sibling "extract variable".

When I programmed in Java in IntelliJ I remember that "extract method" knew to detect similar blocks in the same class and offered it as an option, but I don't remember it doing over several classes.

[juan_gandhi]

Sure. As to going manually, I don't see the point. IntelliJ does it for me. Regarding several classes, no, but if we are severely changing the signature, it may involve a bunch of dependencies.

[soid]

Extract method – I forgot about it; I should try to use it. IntelliJ usually lets you review refactoring, line by line, every line proposed to change, and allows granular control what to change and what to skip. It even proposes to change comments when renaming. Unfortunately, it's not very smart about understanding the comments, especially for generic words like "image" or "page" to proposes to change all places mentioning it. I wonder if LLM will change that soon.

[ionial]

"Extract method" and "extract variable" both are very useful but if the tool doesn't identify similar expressions in the function or block in the class -- it is less useful