One of the benefits of undertaking a software crafting apprenticeship at 8th Light is having opportunity to experiment with new technology stacks and new techniques. …

This blog post is a set of notes for my future self on how to set up a basic React project using Yarn, with babel for compilation and Jest as the test framework. I’ve included a simple ‘Hello World’ unit test to make sure everything is correctly hooked up. Use…

If you’ve been following my previous posts, you’ll know that I’ve been learning Ruby and developing a game of TicTacToe in the process. I’ve just finished implementing a new set of requirements to allow games to be played on a 4x4 board, against an unbeatable computer player. With some algorithmic…

Have you ever found yourself wishing that during unit testing you could hide the terminal output generated by your program? With RSpec, this is pretty simple. In fact, it’s just vanilla Ruby as we’ll see. To hide terminal output during unit tests, we need to redirect where Ruby sends output…

Having predominantly programmed in Java, when creating classes I’m used to overriding equals() and hashcode(). During an exercise converting Kent Beck’s Money Example from Java to Ruby, to help me learn Ruby and improve my TDD skills, I overrode the equivalent methods (equal? and hash) in one of my classes. …

I’m about to embark on writing the venerable game of TicTacToe in Ruby. Given that I want to develop in a way that enables each of the 3 tenets of DevOps to be achieved, I need to configure the project for Continuous Integration (CI). CI is important in DevOps because…

In my previous post, I wrote about setting up a simple Ruby project structure and getting a ‘Hello, world!’ unit test to pass. The next step on my journey to learn Ruby is to complete the coin change kata. For readers not familiar with this kata, the premise is simple…

Today, I started to learn Ruby. Learning a new language is simple — learn the syntax, constructs and over time pick up the idiomatic ways of doing things. Right? Not so much. Yes, learning the language is important. My programming has been predominantly in statically typed languages, most notably Java…

Hello world