Staring into the Void

Monday of this week either Gmail or OfflineIMAP had a super rare transient bug and duplicated all of the emails in my inbox, twice. I had three copies of every email! It was annoying, but I figured it would be pretty easy to fix with a simple Perl script. I was right; here’s how I did it:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use 5.24.0;
use warnings;

use Email::MIME;
use IO::All;

my $dir = shift;

my @files = io->dir($dir)->all_files;

my %message_id;

for my $file (@files) {
   my $message_id = Email::MIME->new( $file->all )->header_str('message-id');
   unless ($message_id) {
      warn "No Message-ID for $file\n";
      next;
   }

   $message_id{$message_id} ||= [];
   push $message_id{$message_id}->@*, $file->name;
}

for my $message_id (keys %message_id) {
   my ($keep, @remove) = $message_id{$message_id}->@*;

   say "# keep $keep";
   say "rm $_" for @remove;
}

After running the script above I could eyeball the output and be fairly confident that I was not accidentally deleting everything. Then I just re-ran it and piped the output to sh. Et voilà! The inbox was back to normal, and I felt good about myself.

🔗 Then I got nervous

Sometimes when you are programming, you solve real world problems, like what day you’ll get married. Other times, you’re just digging yourself out of the pit that is everything that comes with programming. This is one of those times. I’ve mentioned my email setup before, and I am still very pleased with it. But I have to admit to myself that this problem would never have happened if I were using the web interface that Gmail exposes.

See, while I can program all day, it’s not actually what I get paid to do. I get paid to solve problems, not make more of them and then fix them with code. It’s a lot of fun to write code; when you write code you are making something and you get the nearly instant gratification of seeing it work.

I think code can solve many problems, and is worth doing for sure. In fact I do think the code above is useful and was worth writing and running. But it comes really close to what I like to call “life support” code. Life support code is not code that keeps a person living. Life support code is code that hacks around bugs or lack of features or whatever else, to keep other code running.

No software is perfect; there will always be life support code, incidental complexity, lack of idempotence, and bugs. But that doesn’t mean that I can stop struggling against this fundamental truth and just write / support bad software. I will continue to attempt to improve my code and the code around me, but I think writing stuff like the above is, to some extent, a warning sign.

Don’t just mortgage your technical debt; pay it down. Fix the problems. And keep the real goal in sight; you do not exist to pour your blood into a machine: solve real problems.

Posted Thu, Jun 16, 2016

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