Tips for Dev Experience

I was asked by a software developer recently how to grow in experience, in the context of job applications, and I put my thoughts here as an encouragement to all software developers out there looking grow in their career. 

Two memes (and there are many like each one)

Software technology changes quickly, each company has their own software “stack” and established companies rarely try all the new things. It would be impossible, or at least difficult, to be a pro at many programming languages and all the frameworks available. However, and thankfully, these days it is possible to gain experience outside the job. “Experience” can mean two different things:

1. General knowledge of how software stacks (purpose of each part of the stack, how pieces talk to each other, pros, cons, tradeoffs, etc)
2. Specific programming languages. 

The nice thing is, one can build up the other. We use a lot of JavaScript at work and I have a few years working with other languages (#2), but my knowledge of software systems (#1) is pretty good so even if a company used a language I am not most familiar with (say, Python), I could work on a little python project and the concepts I know (#1) will carry me enough on a weaker language (#2). 

So basically, a programmer these days can grow a personal portfolio of real projects until their work experience catches up. Build a real system using a database, server and web page (free). Host that system in the cloud– all have free tiers. Put your code in a code repository (GitHub, BitBucket – both free). There are many blogs out there that walk someone through each of those things. Same for building a mobile app, or sourcing your data from an open API or contribute to an Open Source project. 

Not only does this add a few lines on the ol’ resume, it is real experience building a software system and can be talked about during interviews. Opinions are formed. Dialog is easier. New concepts are understood easier. One can legitimately say, “I’ve done that” or “I’ve built that” and it’s not guessing or BS. If a real project has been built, the pieces need to work together. Best practices are found on-line. The bugs have to be investigated. It is running on the cloud. It is a real system! Promote that during interviews; “this is what I did,” and one can have the confidence to do so because the system was really built! And you'll have the passion to talk about it because it's "your" system (and us devs love our own code : ) 

A step further would be to do it again changing a few pieces of the system:

• use a NoSQL DB instead of SQL (or vice versa)

• host on a different cloud provider (AWS, Heroku, Google Cloud, MS Azure)

• make the same web pages with a different front-end framework (VueJS, AngularJS, ReactJS, etc)

• change the server (Node, Python, Go, Java, C#)

Same system with a different piece or two will give a lot of experience, and prepare anyone a little more to jump into a new team or software stack.

That’s my two cents. Certified education and academia has its place, and real work experience is key, but knowing how software works in practice carries a lot of weight as well, especially in early and mid career. This can be invested in with some off-hours time, and is available to anyone who is interested. 

Picking a project that is meaningful or personal helps a lot here. Some people just like to learn and do tutorials for fun. Others, like me, need a vested interest before spending the time. A potential business idea would be cool, but even a hobby interest can be enough to actually enjoy the work. And if one does not enjoy the software language, or the grind, or the learning, that is actually very valuable experience as well!

Git connections while using PdaNet+

Sometimes we travel to my parents' place, who do not have internet or wifi. 

~Me, basically

We do have cell service, so working remote is possible. I use PdaNet+, a nice utility app for Android that turns my phone into a wifi hotspot on the MacBook. This works great for most everything that uses https. (Special ports, like a direct connection to Postgresql 5432 and the like do not work, likely blocked by phone carrier). This Wifi Direct connection on the Mac (Big Sur) requires a special proxy port, but then email clients and web browsers work great. 

However, git was giving me problems. An error like this:

$ git pull

fatal: unable to access 'https://***@bitbucket.org/***/***.git/': Could not resolve host: bitbucket.org

All other http works, but this does not? Aaarrgh!!

The fix: Set the proxy directly in git as well (same that is needed in WiFi Network settings)

$ git config --add http.proxy http://192.168.49.1:8000

(don't forget to `git config --global --unset http.proxy` when done). 

Now git works too. I'm living large on the edge of civilization : )

Edit: When using SSH Git (like BitBucket or GitHub required in 2022) the config has to be set another way. These lines were needed in ~/.ssh/config (and needed to be removed/commented when done)

ProxyCommand nc -x 192.168.49.1:8000 %h %p

ProxyCommand nc -X connect -x 192.168.49.1:8000 %h %p

ElasticBeanstalk HTTP Time

Web servers with NodeJS are fast, right? Yep, most of the time. The use case for our system is that users collect data with photos on their mobile app offline until they send their data. It's a nice hand-shake that the data exists on the device until the server receives it, so there is no data-loss and working offline was a requirement for the app. Typically an upload is a big JSON object and some photos. A few hundred K in most uploads. Recently one of our auditors keep a week's worth of data with a lot of photos, and gets a timeout when trying to send the data. 60 seconds and the upload fails. (We don't chunk it into multiple requests to maintain that handshake, and in 99.99% of the cases it is never a problem.)

We won't release a new mobile version for this single user, so the change needs to be made on the servers. Ours use ElasticBeanstalk, which is a fairly standard system setup, in that our traffic follows this flow:

LoadBalancer -> Instances, and each instance NGINX -> NodeJS

Lots of these stages can timeout on your HTTP requests, mostly by having a default. I have a testable HTTP request I made through Chome and watched the results in in the Dev Tools Network window. Initial testing died exactly at 60.

LoadBalancer

We are using AWS, so go to the EC2 service, on the left for Load Balancers, and change the "Idle Timeout." 

NGINX

This could have two places to change, one is NGINX itself (which is really handling all the web traffic) and the other is the NGINX-Node proxy. 

I made these changes in our server { context.

        client_max_body_size 50M;

        client_body_timeout 300s;

        keepalive_timeout 300s;

        send_timeout 300s;

And these in our location /api { (which is a proxy_pass to the nodejs upstream)

            proxy_send_timeout 300s;

            proxy_read_timeout 300s;

            send_timeout 300s;

These NGINX directives are all documented here: http://nginx.org/en/docs/dirindex.html. The main thing is to allow the connection to live with NGINX and upload for a while (the server changes), and that NGINX will keep the connection to node for longer (the location changes). These all had timeouts 30s - 60s.

This worked well! My test action made it to 120s. This increased my previous timeout values, but still not 300s like the settings suggested.

NodeJS

The default Node http servers could have timeouts on two places. First is the default server timeout (120s) and the second is the client request timeout. The server timeout defaults to 0 in Node 13 (and though we are using v12.18 this one was not an issue). Each request can have a different timeout as well. I made our two problematic endpoints have a longer timeout this:

req.socket.setTimeout(5 * 60 * 1000) // 5 minute timeout!

That was the final one. My test call actually completed in 4.3 minutes so the extended timings worked through the full system.

When did I start my Mac

Sometimes I wonder when I started my work day, typically when I set up my laptop at the office. There is a command for this!

pmset -g log | grep 'Display is turned on' | tail

pmset -g log | grep 'Wake from Normal' | tail

You can try either one, and get some output like this:

2020-06-09 07:47:49 -0400 Notification         Display is turned on                      

2020-06-09 07:48:56 -0400 Notification         Display is turned on                      

2020-06-09 08:39:29 -0400 Notification         Display is turned on                      

2020-06-09 08:46:16 -0400 Notification         Display is turned on 

A short list of useful activity with the time of day.  Yay!

Integration Tests in Jest - Specific Group Serialization

Jest is a cool testing framework for NodeJS, and was adopted by my favorite API framework actionheroJS. In past projects I used Mocha, but to try something new I'm using Jest.

Background

I like to write integration tests when testing my APIs (I find them the most meaningful) which typically has a group of API calls in a single test suite. User Permissions, Client Configurations, Business Processes, etc are tested together.  Most times a folder contains the group of test for that suite, and tests are expected to run sequentially because the data created for the "create" api calls could be used for the "update" "read" and "destroy" API calls as well.

Enter Jest. Every test file is able to run in parallel and the state is independent of the other tests. Serial in a single file and parallel across many files. Great for running all the tests, but makes it hard to share state between them. To group my API calls I could either:

1. Put them all in a single file to test out the entire suite. Or...
2. Build up some testing data before each suite runs. 

I did not like #1 because the files would get huge. Each group might have 4-15 API calls that need exercised, plus setup/teardown and a few error cases. That's a lot of lines. Code folding in my IDE?

I did not like #2 too much either - custom testing code to "build the data" at the start of each test, plus a 5 sec or so boot time for a backend API instance to start on the server. Smaller files leads to a lot of boots and a lot of time (even with extra cores and Jest workers). Perhaps a DB seed file could ensure certain data would be available, but that's as dynamic as building on the fly and it's one more thing to maintain for the test suite.

What Does Not Work

To find a solution, I learned some things.

First, you cannot create a single, shared global to use across all your test suites. Lots of chatter about that here, but the summary is only JSON-serializable things can be global values. API tokens or WebSocket URLs? Sure. Instantiated objects with functions and all sorts of other initialized data, like an actionhero api instance?  No way. Each test suite is running in its own worker thread, meaning it has its own scope and cannot "talk to" the others (and don't try because they're all running parallel which could lead to craziness!).

Second, and this is true for many Node test frameworks (Mocha for sure), is that test setup (the describes) is synchronous while test running (it(), test(), beforeEach(), etc) is asynchronous. For Jest, you cannot instantiate a variable inside a describe() block that you want to use in your tests. You can initiate a variable, but must instantiate inside a test() or beforeAll() function.  The describe() functions all run at the start of testing synchronously, to setup what tests will run. The actual tests and variable instantiation happen when the test run, so if the variable was assigned in a describe() block, and not a test block, that assignment took place in the setup phase and likely does not contain what you expect it to (often leading to "cannot read property X of undefined" errors).

Solution

Let's jump into the solution, and it was as "simple" as sharing the API instance in the worker process scope in the same way that the api instance is used in the actionhero api.
Here we have a single actionhero instance started before all the test suites are run, and stopped after. Describe blocks are run in the order they are defined, so we describe the suites here, but the contents are in other files and can define their own beforeAll() or afterEach() functions. The convention is that are in their own describe() block.

Be sure to put that __test__/lib directory in your ignore patterns, or Jest will try to run them.

"jest": {

"testPathIgnorePatterns": [

"./__tests__/lib/*/*"

],

It is possible to change "describe('Create', createTests)" to "createTests()" by changing the export of the create.ts to be like this:

export default () => {

return describe('Create', () => {

I do not prefer it that way because some information would be hidden in 00-template-tests.ts, but it's an option!

You could probably do some fancy "walked directory" imports to find all the files in ABC order and include them in your suite - depending how large your suite grows or how annoying you find it to update the main test file.

That's how I'm running Jest tests in sequential groups, but maintaining parallel suites for all part of my API. Working for now, and I'll update this post if something goes terribly wrong : ) 

Winston v2 to v3 and Papertrail Logging

Winston is a logging library for NodeJS and has a bunch of community-built “transports” that use the Winston API to log to different places. Maybe “Console” and “Single File” while developing, and “logging service like papertrail” and “rotating log file” while in production. Code in the application “just logs” and configuration sends the messages where they should go. That how it works in our framework of choice, actionhero. 

Well, Winston went through a big upgrade to v3. This affected my project because the framework we were using had used Winston 2.x, and when I upgraded Node versions and our framework version, suddenly we were using Winston 3.x and my logs to papertrail stopped! We were using the Winston-papertrail transport which has been watching Winston v3 in a few different issues. While it worked, the logging looked junky because the transport was not updated and basically printed messages twice in the same log to Papertrail. Ugly, but at least functional again.

That’s where I ended yesterday and was just going to deal with it, when I found there was a v2 branch for Winston-papertrail. They say it’s not complete (some connect error cases) and I had to change my formatting a little in my application, but it works lovely and everything is back and running again. The community is slow moving on the Winston-papertrail project but it’s hanging in there and any Node project moving from v2 to v3 of Winston and wants Papertrail should be aware of it.

The Senior

Titles are a funny thing. Sometimes we like to play them down, and sometimes we like to have big, fancy ones. Banks typically make lots of people "V.P."s so you know you're talking to somebody important. The CEO of my last company said, "you could call me the janitor as long as I got paid more than you." When it comes to developer positions, an often used term is "Senior" and it seems to mean different things at different places.

What is "The Senior"? 

At a previous company, a large defense contractor, there was a technical progression for Software Engineers: Associate -> Engineer -> Senior -> Staff -> Senior Staff -> Principle. It went on from there but not many reached the higher ones. (Remember that previous CEO of mine? ; ) Being a "senior" at that company put you squarely in at a Level 3 Technical position, and was directly related to your experience, education and pay scale. Outside of these extremely large organizations, a "senior developer" means many different things. And it is not consistent among companies.

Sometimes the title is self-defined. If someone thinks they are "senior" and can convince their boss or hiring manager the same, they'll get the title. Some companies have (loosely or strictly) defined criteria for what senior means, and some are too small to think about titles so it seems like people just make things up. I'm looking at you, "Chief Awesomeness Officer at New Startup Company." Everyone there gets a good title because both of you needed cool business cards : )

Is a senior based on experience in years? Skill? A gut feeling - "I know it when I see it." I've seen the title claimed by people that were skilled and/or experienced, but still felt something was lacking. They were good at what they did, but were they a senior in my eyes? Something seemed off, the title did not match.

Trust

To wrap up, for organizations without a defined progression structure, it comes down to trust. What can I trust this person with? 

• new team member/mentee? 
• entire team?
• research project or incubator idea?
• maintain a legacy project that business critical? 
• product roadmap?
• deadline?
• customer (interaction)?

Some people might have skills at some of these, and some experience as well. Ultimately it comes back to the stakeholders, and if they can trust their "Senior" with their product. Placing people in their strength areas is important, and in my opinion, a senior could simply be trusted with more. Maybe more in a few select areas, or just more areas in general. 

In the end, do not worry about titles. Keep working hard and growing your skill set so that you can be trusted with more. A good indication of what you could do is what you have already done (e.g. - What have you done in production setting that earned money?) 

Stakeholders will notice, and are seeking to find, people they can trust with their product.