Feb 13 2020
Isolated Testing in OOP
We’ve all seen it – heavy reliance database fixtures in unit tests. It’s not uncommon to find a unit test consisting of five or more fixtures as setting up for your “unit” test. While it is a good idea to have database transactions in some of your tests, surely they should not be in all of them. And surely not five or more fixtures in a single test. After writing one of these monstrosities, you may walk away with the feeling that this doesn’t seem very isolated. I know I do. After all, unit tests ought to be isolated right?
Jan 31 2020
Is it “Decoupled” or Decoupled?
When implementing separation of concerns, there are many ways to skin a cat. Code can be split, decoupled, and moved around in many different ways. However, not all decoupling is equal. Some can lead to great design, while others may lead to a good deal of technical debt.
Dec 04 2019
Carefully Download It
Are dependencies good or bad? This is a hot topic that seems to make its way into Hacker News quite often.
Jul 30 2019
Reaching for the Familiar Tools
After having worked in so many different languages, there is a clear split in the languages that I really like, and the languages that are okay. The ones that I really like seem to bring something more to the table. Rust touts it’s ownership philosophy, Haskell is purely functional, Elixir embraces OTP and has the friendly syntax of ruby. These languages are awesome. Having a mastery level in these languages would be extremely valuable in today’s software market. Unfortunately, I have not had the pleasure of deep diving into most of them (with exception to Elixir). In any case, what’s holding me back from pursuing this mastery?
May 18 2019
It's Time to Optimize
The time has come. A little while ago I decided to spend some time optimizing this blog.
Apr 23 2019
Learning Languages Effectively
I typically only write about software and software applications, but today I’m going to share a little snippet of advice that I wrote up for a friend regarding language learning.
Mar 20 2019
How I Do Calendars
My calendar began as a haphazard Google calendar. Not all of my events went in there. In fact, most of my life was just in my head. I also didn’t review my upcoming events all that often. To be fair, I was just in the auto-pilot, senioritis, tunnel-vision-for-graduation phase. If anything, I probably received my calendar events as a push notification ten minutes before. Needless to say, I was not as organized as I had liked.