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A collection of 11 posts

Cows in a field in front of budding trees at dusk

code-quality Featured

A bit of perl trickery

I wanted to understand how this snippet worked, and now I do, but at what cost? I have stared too long into perl's abyss, and now it stares back.

Self Care: a Geek's Perspective

learning Featured

Self Care: a Geek's Perspective

Self care doesn't seem to be well understood outside of certain circles these days. My hope with this article is to arm you to take better care of yourself - a skill whose importance has come into sharp relief in the current pandemic.

Driving code design, through tests (IV)

Driving code design, through tests (IV)

In the context of TDD, tests that only exercise the unit level are some of the most restrictive tests you can write, especially if you are maintaining a 1-to-1 relationship between implementation code and test code.

Driving code design, through tests (III)

Driving code design, through tests (III)

The mechanics of Test-Driven Development are pretty easy to grasp, but the addition of a couple of heuristics will really make the practice sing.

Driving code design, through tests (II)

Driving code design, through tests (II)

The mechanics of TDD are pretty easy to learn, but take special care that your tests will be readable to Future You, who has to solve any issues with the code.

Driving code design, through tests (I)

Driving code design, through tests (I)

"Test Driven Development" is not a testing strategy. It's a design strategy.

JavaScript for people who knew JavaScript 15 years ago

JavaScript for people who knew JavaScript 15 years ago

I was assigned a project that used JavaScript everywhere, and I got a taste for how complex the landscape had become. And my experience is not uncommon - there are plenty of engineers with years of experience that are unsure of this "modern JavaScript" thing and/or can't find a way to approach it.

Non-expertly talking about language

Non-expertly talking about language

I want to talk about a particular language feature and I don't want to be held back by a little thing like "not having any expertise in linguistics".

On tests and testing

Hello, gentle reader. Please allow me to rock your entire human face by dropping this truth bomb: > Tests are about more than testing. "Obviously!" you yell, your riposte ringing out triumphantly against what is seemingly a rather anemic statement. The truth bomb has failed to detonate. Your entire human face

continuous-integration

Builds should fail sometimes

Inception > Well, you don't want your builds to succeed all the time... I remember hearing that for the first time a year or two ago and thinking to myself "that's probably one of those counter-intuitive truths that make a lot of sense in the context of Agile. This guy is