I recently started writing tests for an Angular application, so I had to go through the entire process of researching the tools, installing and setting up the libraries, writing the tests and learning the tricks. Here's what I discovered.
When building a feature or fixing a bug, you will be reading the code that exists. One thing I do often is ask, “Why was this done this way?” Programming is not a binary profession. Fuzzy logic would be a better way to explain how problems get solved. Just as programmers' experiences vary, you can find many solutions to get from 0 to 1. So, when I want to answer my initial question, I leverage git blame.
Is your code difficult to work with? Chances are, it’s time to get rid of code you don’t need. That can be a scary prospect, but the rewards can be well worth the effort. Recently, I was inspired by KonMari, a technique for decluttering physical spaces, to help me visualize how to refactor codebases to make them easier to work with.
Amazon OpsWorks is an excellent, low-cost option for Platform-as-a-Service hosting. OpsWorks provides relatively easy-to-use UI mechanisms to manage, deploy and host applications on AWS EC2. Corgibytes uses OpsWorks to host both Rails-based and Angular-based servers for one of our clients. Configuring the Rails-based OpsWorks hosts was easy – mostly because there are tons of blog posts on how to do it. But setting up the Angular server was a bit more problematic for me, as my good friend, Google, provided little help.
As our blogging efforts increased this past quarter, our Lead Content Whisperer, Jo, requested a mechanism to publish blog posts in advance. I was happy to volunteer to build a simple solution using the tools we already had in place.
Markdown, GitHub, Atom, Jekyll, rubber duck, refactoring… Those are just a few of the terms I had never heard before starting here at Corgibytes. Yes, I had heard of a rubber duck, but not being a rubber duck. In case anyone’s thinking “Oh, she’s one of those drips,” let me stop you right there. I’m a knowledge-thirsty geek.
In an era of omnipresent frameworks, libraries and tooling, it may be hard to decide what tool to use and when. I know from experience, that the first thing you do, once you decide to write a module or CLI tool, is set up an environment. Some people love it, some hate it. But no matter on which side you are, you’ll most likely end up spending way too much time doing it, polishing every aspect of the setup.
Do you ever refactor your test code? If not, I hope you consider making this part of your normal practice. Test code is still code and should adhere to the same high standards as the code that's running directly in production. As important as it is, refactoring your test code is actually a little risky. It's very likely that you could turn a perfectly valid test into one that always passes, regardless of whether or not the code that it covers is correct. Let's explore a technique for protecting against that possibility.
One of the comments I get frequently is how the culture of Corgibytes feels distinctive. Clients enjoy working with us, employees are happy and not stressed out, and the company just kind of purrs. This didn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of lots of intention and implementing specific strategies.
One of the many cool things that we do here at Corgibytes is yoga classes three times a week. The word “yoga” conjures up images of fit ladies on their mats in a classroom, and the teacher in the front doing crazy poses. You probably don’t imagine a group of people, each one sitting at his own desk, on different continents, connected online with the teacher and doing the crazy poses in their chairs. Well, that’s how our yoga classes are, and as unusual as this might sound, it is amazing. I love yoga classes!