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Despite doing all these things, a year later we ended up somewhere we didn't originally think we were gonna end up, despite all the requirements gathering, despite all the sitting down with the customer... Because again, in time, they kind of changed the scope of the project, they changed the nature of the project, the... |
They didn't sound like they were looking for product-market fit, or anything like that, which are things that cause a lot of change, a lot of churn. But the conditions for this were effectively perfect. When you establish a business, who wants to build a new piece of software to basically take over manual processes? Th... |
What ended up happening - we now had two models. \[laughs\] Because clearly, we couldn't just replace the old with the new that the developer had done over the weekend. It was unproven, it was all the things you'd expect. So we were like, "Hey, let's change the tires on this 18-wheeler", or 16 -- I don't know how many ... |
\[19:53\] So now we onboarded a new developer... Worst-possible scenario, right? We bring in a new developer. Now they're scratching their heads, wondering, "WTF happened here?" And we kind of didn't have a good answer. It was like, "Well, the old stuff was kind of old and brown and really kind of -- that's not what th... |
So every time we talk about greenfield, brownfield, I just think to that project. It's okay to have brownfield, it's okay to have legacy stuff, it's okay to have cruft, it's okay to have these things, but the naive thing, especially if you lack the benefit of time on your side as a professional, the naive thing to do i... |
So I think we need to learn -- to me, if you've only ever worked on greenfield stuff without the benefit of having sat down and grown with the project and see it in operation, experience the pain of it, get woken up at night by a page... All of these things that give you that well-rounded perspective on these business ... |
**Kris Brandow:** I feel like maybe a good, succinct way to put that is when you are dealing with these big, messy projects, avoid trying to just fix everything in one fell swoop. You've gotta slowly deal with the mess over time. It's not an overnight or over a weekend kind of process. It's like running a marathon, rig... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** Oh, I like it. Don't mind me, I can be a bit verbose... So thank you for summarizing into a TL;DR for me. |
**Kris Brandow:** Yeah, no problem. \[laughs\] |
**Ian Lopshire:** The hard part there then is knowing which things to fix, given the that they take time. What's valuable enough to work on, right? |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** And I propose that engineers are not always in the best position to make that determination. |
**Ian Lopshire:** Scratch your own itch is not necessarily -- because everybody is gonna have plenty itches, and it's very easy for perspective to get warped on that by which things seem itchy to you. |
**Kris Brandow:** I feel like this is a part where the types of engineering roles you have plays a pretty big role in your organization. Because I think there are people that you need to have in this kind of middle space. It's like, you have the people that are up to the senior engineering level, that are sitting in to... |
\[24:05\] So I'll just kind of throw out there another thing, another way to help deal with big, messy codebases is to have people that are kind of sitting in the middle and can see a bit more of the world, at the end of the day. If you just have people on the opposite ends, it's gonna be very difficult to actually get... |
**sam boyer:** I think you're right on the money there about having to really choose what you wanna fix... I can't even do a pretty crusty codebase at my current job, and kind of the way we go about thinking about that is looking at the year ahead, what we have planned... And if we're doing something just to do it, we'... |
**Ian Lopshire:** Every move you make should make a set of visible moves on the other side easier. |
**sam boyer:** Exactly. |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** One of the reasons I like observability and metrics and traces and all that stuff - it's not because it's trendy, whatever trendy name for these things now; it's because they help put a number to things. They help identify inefficiencies, they help identify problem areas. And if you can tie probl... |
The mistake we make as engineers is to think that we can simply tell the business that "Hey, we need to do some refactoring. We need to muff, we need two sprints to go fix things. And if you happen to be lucky enough to work somewhere where the business can afford not to have any features, or fixes, or whatever happene... |
What I've seen work is that if I have numbers, I can tie numbers to pain points for the business. I don't even have to argue about refactoring. The business doesn't care about refactoring, testing... These are our concerns. The business cares about this process is error-prone, it takes forever, it takes five hours to g... |
Now, equipped with that, I will get the time I need as an engineering manager to get something refactored. Again, we're not gonna do the whole codebase, we're not gonna turn the whole thing from green to whatever color is in between brown and green. I don't have a color chart in front of me, I'm sorry... \[laughter\] B... |
**Kris Brandow:** I will say, I've worked with quite a few product managers in my past, and other business people, who are very understanding of the fact that we do need to fix technical debt in codebases and we need to fix these things that bother us... The thing that I have always noticed - I think engineers have a l... |
\[28:25\] And we all come up with these, "Well, it got delayed because of X, Y and Z, and this was it", but it's very difficult for us to articulate that. And I think that is part of the reason we wind up with these big, messy codebases, is that we fail to articulate why we need to do this thing, and we fail to go back... |
So I think that's probably another tip there of like, if you have a big codebase, the way to get it less messy is to be real and raw and honest with yourself and your team about how long is it gonna take you to fix things, and give yourself enough information, even if the business does give you that unlimited runway; e... |
**Ian Lopshire:** Well, you know, not the next place... Like, future you, or future your co-workers. It feels like a truism to me perhaps, but I should verbalize it and see if y'all share the assumption... I'll go back to like "Is the field brown or green?" I think it might be a perception thing. And if that's a percep... |
**Kris Brandow:** Yeah. I've had this kind of expanding take on the "Grass is always greener on the other side." But why is the grass always greener? It's like, well, they take care of their lawn, and they plant grass seed, and they do weed killer, and they do all of this work to make their grass super-green. And your ... |
I feel like there's some amount of keeping up with the Joneses, and us having rose-colored glasses about previous projects and thinking "But that project was real good. I wanna do that thing again." We filter out all of the bad parts of it, so it becomes this idealized green project. |
**sam boyer:** \[32:04\] First of all, I'm glad that we have just so many metaphors right now. I can just picture the faces of people rolling their eyes at me when I use all these metaphors... \[laughs\] But that's okay. So I wanna ask a question - what does "Grass is greener on the other side" mean to you? Because I f... |
**Kris Brandow:** What does it mean to you? |
**sam boyer:** I'm not trying to call you out. What it means to me is that you always think the grass is greener on the other side, but when you get there, you realize all the dandelions and all the patches in the grass that you had, that you were noticing, are also on the other side of the hill, and it was just you no... |
**Kris Brandow:** Yeah, slightly different interpretations of that... Because I'm like, "Okay, the grass is actually greener over there." |
**sam boyer:** Right. |
**Kris Brandow:** So it's like, "Okay, but why is it greener?" But I think both are nuance in analogies of things. I think they're both good ways of thinking of it. It's like, it's greener because they take care of it, but that doesn't mean there's no weeds. It's very hard to have a weedless lawn. So yeah, it looks gre... |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** So my neighbor... \[laughter\] Literally... \[laughter\] Quite literally, I kid you not... |
**sam boyer:** Oh, boy... We're getting out that axe, I can feel it right now. Let's grind that boy let's grind that axe. \[laughter\] |
**Johnny Boursiquot:** I mean, he quite literally has greener grass than I do. And you can see -- and if you can tell where your grass ends and your neighbor's nice, lush, green grass begins... That's all you know, right? \[laughter\] Because there's no artificial barrier -- it's not like there's a wall in between thei... |
So he's literally -- he understood his grass. He was like, "Hey, so call this company, they're gonna analyze the soil... In this part of the country the soil tends to be -- you've got some red clay in it, this and that... So he started telling me why my grass is the way it is, because he had the experience to understan... |
Now, these days my grass is a lot greener. It's still nowhere close to what his is, but I've got fewer patches in my lawn, fewer brown spots... And I think it's the same thing with software. We think we know what we need to do to fix the brown patches, but that's just hubris. We're just arrogant. Like the person who go... |
\[36:20\] If we only sat down and listened, we would start to pick up and understand why things are the way they are, and figure out how to move it forward, how to change it, and realize we're not gonna do it overnight. It takes time, multiple years, as it took my grass... It took me like three years to get it to where... |
I think it's the same thing. I think if you're gonna go into a brownfield project and it's new to you, rather than going in guns blazing and saying "Oh, I know how to engineer software. I'm gonna architect this. I'm gonna do what y'all couldn't do." That's just arrogance. Just slow down, ask around, talk to the busines... |
**Kris Brandow:** I feel like there's another point you had in there as well, of like - before you asked your neighbor, you were watching YouTube videos and you were trying to figure things out, and I think that's how a lot of people try and solve these brownfield problems. They go pick up The Gang of Four, go pick up ... |
So if you're someone that's jumping into a new project, like a new project that's big and messy, it's definitely good to get acquainted with the land first. Understand what type of soil that you have, and then start trying to fix things. Don't think that you can come in and just fix things from day one. And I think thi... |
See, it's okay to have analogies as long as we tie them back to the topic at hand... |
**Break:** \[39:04\] |
**Ian Lopshire:** Johnny, I liked your story, and your tying it back in, and I was reflecting on how I have recently pushed too hard and charged too much in a direction, and did not indeed do enough of the exact kind of listening to local knowledge that you're describing... And problems arose. \[laughter\] And actually... |
**Kris Brandow:** I read a series of books years ago, the Good to Great, and in it they kind of tell you how to think of the momentum of your business as like this giant flywheel that's moving. I think that when we start new codebases, we're kind of just like pushing on it, and it's not going anywhere. But as the codeb... |
So I think your point is right on the spot there, Sam, where it's just like - yeah, we have to understand what is this project. It's not greenfield, it's not new; we're not starting from nothing. We have this whole thing here, and this thing is doing the thing. So we need to figure out how to do what we want to do, whi... |
So I think it applies both to if you just kind of get dropped into a new project, or if you're in a project, you are one of those people with historical knowledge, and you're thinking, "Alright, I think we should start a new thing. I think we should try this again." |
\[43:59\] So just remember, you're gonna have to put in a lot of effort to get it to where your brownfield project is, and you should take that analysis into consideration when you decide "Is this thing so bad? Is this thing so messy that I should get rid of it instead of just fixing it where it is?" |
**sam boyer:** That goes the same. We've been riffing on the brownfield/greenfield thing, but what are we trying to do with the brownfield? Are we trying to change what it is? Is that what's important for business? Are we trying to just extend it? Is the problem that it's messy? There's a lot of different sort of thing... |
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