I've been recently doing a lot of test-driven development at my new job, and one of the things I've noticed is that sometimes we will just run into snags, times when we hit a wall where it feels like we aren't making any real progress forward. There have been a few times now where we have gotten the code down to make the actual product work, but we spend a lot of time struggling to get the tests to pass and to really test the system in a way they we felt was good and proper. The trick is juggling the fact that we want to be a lean team that develops quickly but that we also want to write tests first that will pass when we implement these new features. Sometimes that last "making the test pass when they should" can be a lot more challenging that it ought to be, and it sometimes seems that we're put in a position where we need to choose between cutting corners or further increasing the risk that we ship late. To be honest I don't really have a right answer for all this, but in this post I'll think out loud about some ideas. 

I’ve been working as a software consultant for the past few weeks, and an interesting thing happened.  The initial aggressive plan was to build a working prototype in 2 weeks that involved a React web front-end, Postgres db, and node backend api.  Well, we wanted to not do a complete faceplant so we were kind of forced into cutting corners and optimizing for speed.  For that reason and also since one of our three engineers was somewhat of a Ruby expert we thought it was be a quick win to quickly build out the backend api in ruby on rails. This post is me reflecting on my experiences today pair programming in Ruby on Rails.

Recently I've been getting back into doing some algorithms coding challenge problems, and I really wanted to setup for myself a nice, comfortable coding environment that I could be proud of and that really followed the TDD principles of Uncle Ben, Ken Beck, and all the other gurus. Anyway, this is a guide for setting up simple, barebones TypeScript node.js projects for TDD. I'll show you how to set up a brand new node project, how to make your project a "typescript project", how to add mocha and chai in watch mode, and finally how to see your test results in a nice code coverage report. It's a lot I know, so let's dive into it!

I am the founder and initial creator of Kate From HR, and so often when I am trying to explain it to people they think that it is just another tool for the human resources people at a company. However, I’m now thinking that maybe those in the HR department are not the people to whom I should be selling!

Recently I have been working on some AWS Lambda functions, and I am using the serverless framework to help build and deploy them. However, once I wanted to have multiple stages with different environment variables I was not sure the best way to do it. Here are some things I tried and the command I ended up going with in the end.