KM to miles

We had a form where the user can search for certain types of businesses in the area, and it displayed the distance from your location in miles.

One day, a user was posting all kinds of angry abuse because they said the distance was wildly inaccurate.

We were using a 3rd party API that was supposed to return the distances to the businesses in KM. It seemed that at some point, without us knowing, the API had changed to return the distance in miles, and our current code was expecting KM then we had code to convert it to miles. So now it was coming in as miles but we were manipulating the value to be wrong.

My reaction was that we should just inform the 3rd party to change it back. If their documentation says it is KM then they can’t change it without informing all the providers. If we changed our code, and the 3rd Party then reverted without informing us again, then the values would be wrong again.

A manager decided to go against my advice and told a team they needed to fix it. Soon, a Junior developer contacts me to say he is doing the fix and wants me to explain the situation and be available to review the code.

It’s a simple change, and he adds some unit tests. I pointed out a few more scenarios that he could add since our code was formatting to 2 decimal places. He could add tests for 3 or more decimal places in the data, and include larger values like >10 so you have 2 values before the decimal point.

So as far as I was concerned, if we HAVE TO make a change, then this is the simplest change and he has improved the codebase with the unit tests.

I approved the changes, and 2 other Senior Developers approved too.

When it was ready to go into the Main branch, another Senior flagged some duplicate code. He was correct, but it wasn’t a big deal because it’s one line of code. To “fix” it, you would need to create a new file for one method with one line of code which seemed overkill.

Then another Senior Developer questioned why one class called a method just to delegate to another method; when it could go direct. That scenario happens a lot, especially with design patterns where you want strict degrees of responsibility so the UI shouldn’t have logic. This was a very opinionated change, but since a Senior Developer had said it, then the Junior felt like they should do it.

So after the initial simple change, and 3 developers requesting some very simple changes, he was finally ready to commit the changes. Then a Principal Developer saw the change and said it was definitely the wrong thing to do since we need to get the 3rd party to revert their change. 

That was exactly what I said initially.