Tests, tmux, and t-shirts

Sep 20, 2013 · 2 minute read

This week was full of learning new ideas, philosophies, and dev tools. The week’s project was Event Reporter, a command line app that loads, parses, and queries a CSV file containing attendee data.

The project’s spec can be found here. This project was our first open ended assignment and to make it more fun we started testing our code using MiniTest as well as using git for versioning. I am loosely familiar with both testing and git but had a bit of a rough start to the week. To add to the fun I got myself set up with tmux and vim (both new to me). The week started out slow but I feel like I’ve made an evolving but solid dev workflow for myself.

Tests

The results of my labor this week are here. There are some more classes to be extracted and as of this writing the queue class (which I’m calling Result) is partially extracted. I did choose to truly test drive this piece of extraction and it’s been really fun to see how powerful a well tested class can be. In addition, the MiniTest core team has a good sense of humor and got a deep laugh out of me when I read through the documentation:

My new favorite piece of #ruby documentation minitest's "i_suck_and_my_tests_are_order_dependent!()" method. http://t.co/ikyw3hZQSg

— Simon Taranto (@SimonTaranto) September 19, 2013

Tmux

All I can say is whoa (and productivity). A classmate of mine helped me get set up with iterm2, tmux, and vim. I was previously using a terminal and Sublime but have found that, while there is a non-trivial learning curve for tmux/vim, the ability to have your entire workspace at your fingertips without distraction is liberating and exciting. I look forward to learning more arcane keyboard shortcuts.

T-shirts

Galvanize hosted more than a dozen events this week as part of Denver Startup Week. We had to dodge events all week to find classroom space but the energy in the building and city were palpabale and contagious. As an added benefit my start-up t-shirt collection has ballooned.

Quotation of the week

Your love of ternary operators must be broken.

This gem of a quotation came out of a super helpful 3-hour code review marathon where we went through a bunch of implementations of Event Reporter. I learned a tremendous amount about good patterns (and bad ones).