Helping companies tackle legacy code, and other software development musings
If you’ve been following this blog for some time, you know I develop software mostly using test-driven development AKA TDD. But while this mostly means unit tests, it shouldn’t be limited to only unit tests. At one of my current clients, we use AWS Lambda functions written in TypeScript. These are (usually) relatively small blocks […]
This is 50/50 a real post and a service announcement. The short version is that I’ve removed Google Analytics from this site (and redstar.be, my legacy project blog for non-technical people). I’m also using Brave and DuckDuckGo now. Read on for the long version. Google Chrome For some time, I have felt fairly (but not […]
This may not be new to you, but I recently discovered another cool feature of Git. Rebasing with the autosquash option allows me to keep a clean log with minimal effort. I’ve written about interactive rebasing before. This makes it even easier. Interactive Rebasing You want to do an interactive rebase when you have a […]
I recently saw a tweet on my Twitter-feed about failures and how we should also share our failures, not just our successes. Everyone experiences failure, but if we don’t share them, new developers will feel it’s not OK to make mistakes. So here are some of my mistakes and what I learned from them. This […]
This post was written for the NCrunch blog. You can find the original here. Unit tests help developers write better code and provide a faster way of getting feedback compared to testing manually. But unit tests are also another piece of code that must be maintained and taken care of. Unit tests can become a […]
This post was written for the NCrunch blog. You can find the original here. There are many ways of testing your application or library. The test pyramid provides a good starting point to the most common types of tests—unit tests, integration tests, end-to-end tests, and manual tests. But there are other types of tests, like […]
I’ve written multiple posts about legacy code and automated tests. I believed both are closely connected in that one can help solve the other. I also enjoy working on legacy code, improving software development practices and improving code quality. But this blog has always been geared towards developers, and it seems managers don’t always follow. […]
As an independent consultant, I work for companies large and small. But I (lightly) engage in some open source work, from submitting bugs over creating pull requests to maintaining my own RedStar.Amounts library. The open source community has some best practices that are often missing in companies. Here are some that I recommend you try […]
This post was written for the NCrunch blog. You can find the original here. Test-driven development is a technique to drive the development of your project. TDD enables you to verify your code, it provides confidence for refactoring, and it enables a cleaner architecture. But what if you already have an existing codebase that wasn’t developed with […]
This post was written for the NCrunch blog. You can find the original here. When you dive into automated testing and test-driven development, it won’t take long before you learn about the testing pyramid. If you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry. I’ll explain what it is first, then go into some variants, and finally […]