#503 Refactoring

This week we completed significant refactoring to remove deprecated patterns from our codebase.

After shipping our dark mode theme we had noted increasing friction surrounding a number of deprecated coding patterns for the way that components were being styled and rendered. When you’re writing code by hand, deprecated patterns aren’t such a big deal: you just don’t use them, and, if they get in your way you refactor the offending code. When you’re generating code using AI it can become more problematic: the current generation of frontier models might pick up on the deprecated patterns as the preferred way to write code (even if you instructed it not to use them) and multiply exactly what you don’t want through the code base. Luckily, refactoring is one of the classes of work that generative AI excels at. If the pattern isn’t in the code base to begin with, it won’t be used.

This week, we stripped the code base of any CSS-in-JS patterns that were still in use, and, performed other significant clean up. All-in-all over 900 files were touched by these changes—work that would have previously been impossible cost effectively. What a time to be alive!

Also this week, a long-time Parabol user once again kindly requested that we build an integration to Asana. The last integration we added was Linear. Building it touched 135 files and ~54,700 lines of code. Yikes!

We’re working on a refactoring proposal to address this area of the code base next. When it is completed, it should make it easier to add significantly more integrations much more easily.

More or less what we expected from our metrics this week. August tends to be a very quiet month as our European user base suspends their regular work rhythm and goes on holiday.

…merged the first series of pull requests related to Team Health. Coming soon, a feature that will allow team leaders to monitor the health and engagement of teams within their entire organization.

…merged changes enabling the Task Review phase by default for new teams. Of the 525,728 completed retrospectives with 3+ participants, the meeting will generate on average 11 groups that could be discussed. A group created in a retrospective has a completed discussion 63.4% of the time. However, this discussion will only result in a task being generated a mere 13.7% of the time. Our hope with enabling Task Review is that our tasking system will be more visible, and encourage teams to take more action improving their team work. This change is only a part of other task and integration-related enhancements planned for this development cycle.

…start week 2 of 6 executing our plan for Shape Up Cycle 15.