Refactored scope

The poster asked “This may be offtopic but i really want to share this.
Did you ever faced criticism with your code. How to overcome this criticism ?”

And this was my response.

Every so often I go back to something I wrote 10 years ago and I laugh my ass off. Now if 10 years ago someone had done that, it would have been somewhat of a painful experience. People have already mentioned “you are not you’re code” which is mostly true BUT at same time you are your code at this moment in time. When a peer criticizes your code, you need to quickly detach yourself and hear out what they have to say. Sometimes their input is going to be asinine ( “I prefer naming variable after my kid’s” ) but hopefully its going to real value ( “You should implement dash or camel casing, does ‘expertsexchange’ mean Expert Sex change or Experts exchange? “)

Before I give whatever advice on filtering poisonous vs constructive criticism, going to address why you want criticism. If you are a small person, you will be stuck in a small world and only realize the situation when people are selling cars and you’re still crafting buggy whips to a doomed industry ( eg COBOL & mainframes vs Java & server farms ). To improve your craft, yes you need challenging work but you also need to be exposed to different idea’s or you will not grow professionally.

Now as far as handling criticism and deciding if it has value. #1 is that you need to check your emotions and listen. #2 identify the problem they have with your work and clarify so you have concrete examples of what is and is not the problem. #3 Evaluate the value of fixing the problem “Does this improve things for my team and our success” or “Does this make my product better and or more maintainable?”

If the person cannot give concrete examples of #2, tell them you don’t understand. If they cannot do this without resorting to verbal abuse, conversation is over and escalate to supervision or discontinue discourse.

If the person cannot demonstrate #3 ( eg how does using their children’s names make things “better”? ) escalate or discontinue, telling them that you don’t seen an advantage to their proposal.

Finally, emotion’s get you into a fight you may not be able to win or will have costs to your career down the line. One example is a person I found immensely influential to my career and I thought he was the bee’s knees. This person was outspoken and somewhat vitriolic but he was generally right ( or appeared to be ). 5 years down the road, he seems like a “has been” that is constantly verballing threatening to beat up people when they criticize his code or his behavior “I am a MMA fighter, I will kick your ass”. For the most part I think that guy’s career is on its way out as who wants to collaborate or associate with him? Also I am not talking about Linus Torvald… he’s a completely different kind of crazy with a completely different problem.

http://www.stevecoursen.com/209/stackless-python-meets-twisted-matrix/

https://github.com/smira/txZMQ

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Twistless/1.0.0

goals: evaluate speed over memory for pypy using stackless/coroutines with ZMQ and twistless ( if its even possible without rebuilding txZMQ ).

Initial goal would be to take github.com/devdave/pyfella and let two stacks fight it out for an hour ( assuming 10x deep othello minimax ).

CQL3 is a very nice abstraction to Cassandra but its important to pay attention to what it is doing.

In SQL land, 1 record == 1 row. In Cassandra 1 record == 1 row, but 2+ records can ALSO be on the same row. This has to do with CQL’s partition and primary keys. Your partition key is what decides which row a record belongs to while the primary key is where the record is in a row. If you only have a primary key and no partition key, 1 record == 1 row, but if you have a composite ( partition key, primary key) every record where partition key is the same is going on the same row.

I had a few rows that were ~30GB in size which put stress on nodes using m1.xlarge ( 8GB heap, 300MB new heap size ) with epic Compaction cycles of doom.

These directions will setup openvpn ( you need that unless your dev’ing inside AWS )

http://sysadminandnetworking.blogspot.com/2012/12/openvpn-on-ec2aws.html

New Python cassandra driver is here https://github.com/datastax/python-driver
It’s really new so it has sharp edges.

Initially I was going to set the experiment with ZMQInline aside but I am starting to realize that it does have some merits.

Below is a burnout test I did using dotGraph ( current name candidate )

@ZMQInline()
    def do_kickstart(self):
        self.log.debug("do_kickstart")
        for i in range(1, 100):
            try:
                try:
                    self.log.debug("Process Loop {0}".format(i))
                    response = yield Request(self.control, RequestKickstart(), timeout = 5000)
                except TimedoutError:
                    self.log.exception("Timedout")
 
                except Exception:
                    self.log.exception("Unexpected exception")
                else:
                    self.log.debug("Got "+ repr(response))
 
                    if RespondWithKickstart.Matches(response):
                        self.log.debug("Got Kickstart!")
            except Exception as e:
                self.log.error("Caught an exception leak {0}".format(e))
 
        self.loop.stop()

In Dotgraph, Kickstart is the first task both client’s and services need to accomplish and it’s basically “Hello I am here, who do I talk to?”. Depending on the Kickstart response, clients and services might be sent to a completely different host, port set. The idea is that if DotGraph needs to grow, it can have an array of slave hubs and then delegate new client’s to the most underbooked.

One thing I realized is that the above structure would perfect for doing standoff logic ( attempt, time out…wait, attempt N seconds later). Of course it begs the question of WHY the other party hasn’t responded in time ( are they down or just backlogged? ). Other problem is how to do unit-testing cleanly? Still, I haven’t thrown it away yet so maybe I will find a use for it in DotGraph.