While snapshot testing has been around for a while in the form of visual snapshots (used in visual regression testing), it’s clear that the introduction of textual snapshots in Jest a few years ago had a big impact on testing, not only in JavaScript but in other languages as...
As I was browsing through Twitter the other day, I saw someone complaining about abstractions among the lines of “we add abstraction layers on top of more abstraction layers and expect the system to be easy to maintain.” I understand this feeling because I’ve also felt that way before....
Creating branches in git is blazingly fast and having a bunch of them is pretty cheap. This means we get to merge them quite often. But how is a branch represented internally and what does it mean to merge them? Understanding how this works internally will help you understand why...
Recently, one of the most trendy stacks is the JAMStack, which was popularized by Netlify. It’s mainly SPAs but committed to supporting statically generated sites which means no backend, a bit of JS that consumes APIs, and some HTML (I’m overly simplifying here). Regular SPAs can have a...
So many problems in legacy or brownfield applications stem from invalid state being dragged around throughout the whole application and causing a bug somewhere far away from its origin or just dying a silent death. I’d like to introduce you to a method to handle invalid state in new...
Imagine if airplane companies never tested their airplanes. They just ship them when they’re done. Would you feel safe boarding a plane like that? Fortunately, airplanes are not built like that. Flying is statistically the safest way of transportation and there are strict regulations and tests airplanes must abide...
Writing .htaccess files can be an annoying task. There’s a lot written about it, but it remains a hard topic to get right, especially if you’re only doing this infrequently. Testing those files can be hard because it requires a local Apache server running or to upload it...
Talking to strangers in 1930s Moscow was not a smart thing to do. Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz (chairman of the management committee of one of the biggest Moscow literary clubs – MASSOLIT) and his young companion, poet Ivan Nikolayich Poniryov (who wrote under the pseudonym of Bezdomny) knew that all too well....
PHP7.4 introduced this cool new feature called “typed properties” which add the existing PHP type system to class properties. This means that you can now enforce which types a property has without having to encapsulate it in an object. An example class containing typed properties looks like this: class...