Polishing my Strange Loop talk

With Strange Loop drawing closer, I’ve been spending most of my free time tweaking and practicing my talk about the dynamic relationship between Alda and Clojure.

As I tend to do, I planned way too much material and so I ending up having to trim down the sections of my talk in order to keep it under time. Some things I had to cut include:

An extended demo at the beginning of the talk where I review the features of Alda and show examples. I realized that, while interesting, an in-depth discussion of Alda’s features is off-topic, and I wanted to keep the focus of the talk on the relationship between Alda and Clojure.
A short tangent about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as it relates to programming languages and music notation software. I think it was good material, and it was sure to be interesting to some of the audience, but it wasn’t entirely relevant to the topic at hand, so I had to cut it for the sake of time.

Timing the sections

To keep track of roughly how long it takes me to present each section of the talk, I included a comment at the top of each section with a rough estimated time like 1 minute or 5 minutes. Then, I wrote the following script that parses out all of the estimates and sums them up.

#!/usr/bin/env bash

scriptdir=$(dirname $0)
rootdir="$scriptdir/.."

function estimated_length() {
  grep -Eo "[[:digit:]]+ minutes?" "$rootdir/index.adoc" \
    | grep -Eo "[[:digit:]]+" \
    | ruby -e 'sum = 0; while n = gets; sum += n.chomp.to_i; end; p sum'
}

echo " (~$(estimated_length)/40 minutes planned)"

This was handy, as I could time myself practicing each section individually and update the estimates, and get a rough idea of the total length of my talk. At one point, I had an estimated 56 minutes of material to fill a 40 minute time slot, so that was a clear indication that I needed to start trimming it down!

Git submodules

We use git submodules at work as an easy way to share code between Git repositories. We have a couple of repos filled with common code, deployment scripts, etc. and we use those repos as submodules in other repos.

The trade-off is complexity; we have to worry about what versions of the submodules are used within a particular repo. Contributors to any of our repos that use submodules have to remember to initialize and update the submodules (i.e. check out the specified version of the submodules), because Git does not do this for you automatically.

Making sure the submodules are always checked out properly

Personally, I’ve found that I almost never want my git submodules to be in a state other than the commit specified in the repo. When I check out a commit in a repo, I want the correct submodule versions to be checked out without me having to think about it. As such, I’ve created a gpl alias that I use exclusively wherever I would ordinarily run git pull. It does the equivalent of the following:

git fetch --all --prune && git merge
git submodule init && git submodule update

This does a couple things that git pull doesn’t do out of the box:

When branches are deleted upstream, my local copy of the remote is updated accordingly. (This is the --prune argument to git fetch).
The correct version of all submodules for the current commit is checked out.

Updating submodules properly

I’ve also defined a gsu alias that updates the versions of all submodules to the latest commit of the upstream master branches of the submodule repos. Git has a built-in command for this, git submodule update --remote, which works well enough except in the scenario where somebody temporarily switches branches in the submodule, and now the submodule is no longer tracking the intended branch of the submodule repo.

I’m leaving out the code for the sake of brevity, but my gsu alias does the following:

For each submodule in the repo…
- If the submodule is on a commit included in master, then update to use the latest commit on master.
- If not, then print what branch(es) the commit is on so that I can sort it out manually. Typically this means making sure that the alternate branch of the submodule gets merged into master and that the submodule is tracking master.

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