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You hear everybody talk about the newest feature to Widgets but you can’t find a single model reference to that in the code. What happened? Sometimes the business changes aren’t reflected in the code. Sometimes, you're missing information or the code grows into something different. What do you do? ‘Cuz you still gotta ship. Buckle up for a fast paced ride through the opportunities and pitfalls faced when you find yourself in this position. Through success and failure stories, learn how to leave space for names to breathe, make changes safely, and walking that fine line of changing just in time.
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In the presentation titled "Oops! You named it wrong. What now?" at RailsConf 2022, Ian Norris and Melissa Hunt Glickman explore the complexities and challenges developers face when the names in their code become misaligned with the evolving business context. They emphasize the importance of naming conventions and how poorly chosen names can lead to confusion, wasted time, and miscommunication within a development team. Key points discussed include: - **The Significance of Naming**: Good names provide clarity, while bad names can lead to misunderstandings and inefficiencies. Developers often struggle with naming due to contextual changes over time. - **Contextual Examples**: Throughout the talk, Ian and Melissa provide examples from their experiences, including a scenario involving the renaming of "suggestions" to "outreach prompts" in a healthcare application, which ended up causing data integration issues due to misaligned expectations in the database. - **The Process of Renaming**: They discuss strategies for safely renaming components in a codebase, highlighting the importance of avoiding breaking changes, and the use of parallel approaches like dual writing during transitions to newer naming conventions. - **The 'Rename Dance'**: Melissa introduces her concept of the "rename dance"—a careful method to handle renaming without incurring downtime or breaking existing functionality. The process involves stepping through changes in a structured way and monitoring them in production before fully committing. - **Learning from Mistakes**: Anecdotes shared illustrate both successful and unsuccessful renaming efforts, highlighting the lessons learned from potential pitfalls. - **Balancing Perfectionism and Practicality**: The speakers emphasize that perfectionism can hinder progress, and it's better to aim for a "good enough" name rather than strive for a perfect one, while focusing on the objective of delivering value through shipping code. Overall, the session underlines the necessity of approaching naming with caution and thoughtfulness, as names can heavily influence development processes and team interactions. By recognizing when and how to implement changes to code names, developers can significantly improve their work environments and overall efficiency in the software development lifecycle.
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