Blog post: Development update (May 19)

website/blog/2019/05-19-development-update.md

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+Title: Development update (May 19)
+Date: 2019-05-19
+
+The great "Model Merge" refactoring, which I described in the [previous post](04-28-model-merge) has
+been
+[committed](https://github.com/odahoda/noisicaa/commit/accff25ed0495d14a793f5d5acbec6158b1a1afa).
+
+Overall it was mostly painless and worked the way I planned. In the beginning it felt a bit like a
+massacre as I was tearing down a lot of code, and the whole thing was in some messy intermediate
+state, but quickly new patterns emerged and the conversion became mostly
+mechanical. [mypy](http://mypy-lang.org/) and [pylint](https://www.pylint.org/) were very helpful
+tools during this adventure. I basically went from one file to the next, fixing all the issues that
+they complained about and at the end, when all pieces fell into place and I had something executable
+again, there were just very few bugs left - I think just one issue, which was detected by a unittest
+and one or two issues I found through manual testing. The biggest advantage of those tools over
+unittests alone is that they produce meaningful reports for a single file even if the code at large
+isn't in a usable state. I had to refactor a lot of code in different places before I could even get
+any passing unittests and without mypy/pylint I would have been flying blind for that time.
+
+After I executed my plan, I had took another stab at the idea of auto-generating some of the
+boilerplate code for model classes. I tried it once before, but abandoned it again, because it
+turned out to be too complicated. But with the new, much simpler code structure after the
+refactoring, it became much easier to do. That got rid of another batch of "boring" code and adding
+new classes (e.g. for more builtin node types) should now be much less cumbersome than it was
+before.
+
+According to [SLOCCount](https://dwheeler.com/sloccount/) the total code base shrank by
+approximately 3000 source lines of code or 6% (or almost 8% when just looking at the Python code),
+which is quite considerable.
+
+With this project out of the way (and out of my head), I should do some "shiny new features" sprint
+next.