This week was fairly quiet: Monday was a bank holiday, and it’s perf season inside Google, so everyone was busy writing about themselves and others instead of writing code…
Unfortunately for me personally it was a week of going down rabbit holes & yak shaving.
I spent far, far too long visiting the innards of cmp and protocmp in an effort to modernise an older test. The premise was simple: convert all int64 values in a particular message to 1, so that we don’t care about the values, just the presence or absence of the value. I was trying to use FilterMessage(), but couldn’t make it work. Eventually I ended up with a more brute-force approach: alter the entire result, not just the message I was concerned with.
cmp.Transform("normalize", func(int64) int64 {
return 1
})
The other yak shaving relates to a data pipeline. I was switching it from reading some files to reading from a Spanner database. The code change was verbose, but fairly simple. Then I tried to run it and discovered the configuration change I needed was anything but. I ended up with some configuration of command line flags … in a proto message … wrapped in another command flag … embedded in some GCL … in turn embedded in another shell script. Not only was the quoting horrific, but I couldn’t make the GCL do what I needed. I ended up hacking the interpreter to emit errors from an eval() statement which are normally thrown away. This is one of the benefits of having everything in a monorepo, but I really didn’t need to spend hours on this.
Stats: 9 changes submitted, 47 reviewed.
Jabbering Giraffe 