Refactoring, Coffee and a Moose

I don’t know how many times this app we’re working on will have to survive open-heart surgery. It might sound like I’m exaggerating, but I’m hardly doing so. The amount of refactoring we’ve done this past week would make anyone a guaranteed caffeine addict.

That said, the app is running a lot better. Unironically, Hive Snaps right now runs very snappy. Most of the heavy lifting my brother has been doing will probably go unnoticed by most people. Software design and architecture are topics that only interest us nerds, but in the end, they have the biggest impact on the user experience.

I’ve grown to appreciate the work of the Peakd and Ecency teams a lot more lately. The minutiae you have to consider, the endless edge cases, and the handful of users who refuse to have any sort of consistency in their lives—breaking all your parsing logic with every post.

Before calling it a night, I’m happy to report I’ve submitted seven pull requests for my brother to review. Chances are he won’t approve them all, at least not right away, but these little tweaks feel necessary to me.

I don’t know who said it first, but it’s a real thing—so much so that developers laugh when they talk about it. The countless hours spent building a feature or adding a detail just for the one person who does things differently. If there’s a champion for that, it has to be @friendlymoose. He’s shown me about five different ways people post images on Hive, a few I didn’t even know existed.

Here’s hoping tomorrow is productive too. I haven’t been sleeping that well lately, and there’s only so much coffee can do for a man.

See you on the flip,

MenO