Thoughts about software development

Simplest solutions are usually the best solutions. We as software developers work with hard problems and solve a lot of small problems every day. Solving a hard problem itself is a hard job. Though in my opinion it's not enough to solve a hard problem in any possible way but a hard problem should be solved with a simple solution. When a developer comes up with a simple solution to a hard problem then they can declare the problem solved. First a disclaimer. Coming up with a simple solution to a hard problems is itself a very hard problem and takes a lot of time, effort and practice. I've seen my share of "clever" solutions for hard problems and the problem with those is that usually the solution itself is so hard to understand that depending on the size of the problem it may take a developer from hours to days or even weeks to understand how that "clever" solution works. It's a rare occasion when a developer has come up with a simple solution to a hard pr...

There are two hard things in programming and naming is one them. If you don't believe me ask Martin Fowler https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html . In this post I'll be covering some general conventions for naming things to improve readability and understandabilty of the code. There are lots of things that need a name in programming. Starting from higher abstractions to lower we need to name a project, API or library, we probably need to name the source code repository, when we get to the code we need to name our modules or packages, we give names to classes, objects, interfaces and in those we name our functions or methods and within those we name our variables. Overall a lot of things to name. TLDR; Basic rule There's a single basic convention to follow to achiveve better, more descriptive naming of things. Give it a meaningful name i.e. don't use shorthands like gen or single letter variables like a, x, z instead tell what it represents, what it does...

Integration test is something that tests a functionality that is dependant on a external system e.g. a database, HTTP API or message queue. Integration vs unit tests The line is thin in my opinion. The integration part can be faked or a embedded services can be used in place of the actual integration point and with these solutions the interaction with the external system is bounded in the test context and the tests can be executed in isolation so they are very much like unit tests. The only difference with this type of integration test and unit test is that the startup time of the embedded or faked system usually takes some seconds and that adds total execution time of the tests. Even though the total test exection time is longer all the tests need to pass and all the cases need to be covered whether there's external systems involved or not so the importance is equal between the test types. This is why I wouldn't separate unit and integration tests from each other within the co...

Unit tests are the developers number one safety net. Let that sink in. This is the number one reason for writing unit tests. Unit tests are written by developers for developers to ensure that the code works as expected and handles happy and sad paths correctly. With enough unit test coverage the tests enable a safe environment for refactoring and rewriting code. Unit test scope Unit test should test a single thing, a method or function call and it should test only one use case within. In other words a unit test should test a function with a single input. This is a important guideline to understand. When a unit test tests a function with single input it makes the test isolated, repeatable and predictable. Example of good tests: @Test fun findsAddress() {   val address = findAddress("Stevens street 35", "Southport", "Australia")   assertThat(address).isNotNull() } @Test fun doesNotFindAddress() {   val address = findAddress("Stevens street 697", ...

Recently I joined a project that was built on node.js and views were generated via jade templates. The node.js backend had a few very basic tests in the form of unit tests and frontend didn't have any tests. One of my tasks was to improve the test coverage. Following is a short description of the problem and a example solution how I resolved it. Unit testing I started by going through the existing tests and refactoring those so that they worked as expected and added tests for the functionality I had implemented previously. These tests were run via mocha.js and utilized chai.js and supertest . These were very mainly unit tests except for the one's that utilized supertest which tested that the web application responded correctly to very basic http requests to routes like / or /login . I want more In a previous project that I worked in we had mocha tests that were run in a browser so that it tested the running application within a iframe via mocha. I always liked t...