Week Six was a short one because of the bank holidays. So this blog is coming at you early! Despite this short week we were able to cover a lot and I have improved as a developer after being equipped with testing knowledge. I will be completing some code each day of the break to keep up with my 100 Days of Code challenge. If you want to keep up with that make sure to check out my Twitter!
The mini-week in summary
After that shameless plug lets have a chat about how my week was. In a word - great! We spent our time looking at testing. From previous research I already had a conceptual understanding of what testing was, some tools for testing and just how important it is. One thing I had never done however was actually writing tests. We began using jest. Our learning started by writing simple functions and following the jest documentation to get used to using the documentation for one but also to practise just how to formulate simple tests. After this we moved into test driven development. For me this was the highlight of the week in terms if learning. This shift of focus really helped me understand the basics of what testable code is and now I am much more aware of how useful it can be. Not only does it mean your final product will be well tested and achieve what you want but you also find yourself writing mini documentation for your product as you begin to get a whole new understanding of exactly what every snippet of code does.
Following this we had a guest talk from the developer experience team at cypress (Jordan Powell and Robert Guss). They gave us a great lecture on testing and then we got a cypress demo! It was excellent and I'd like to thank them for their time! We took this knowledge on Wednesday and spent time going through the cypress documentation and writing our own tests for our own to-do list app. Cypress is such an incredible tool and I was blown away by its capabilities! Wednesday ended with a look into API testing. We got to dive into the supertext npm package. This final learning experience made me feel I now had a conceptual understanding of a very wide range of testing procedures. I am going to be sure to add tests to my projects from now on just to get into the habit of good procedure and besides getting the dopamine hit from passing tests is always nice!
In this section I'd also like to send a thank you to Nadeem Shabir who gave us an amazing guest talk on all things testing on Monday morning. Not only did his knowledge on testing help me for the whole week but his answers in the Q&A were amazing and will really help me in my entire career! He is returning soon to give us another couple of talks and I look forward to it.
As you can tell we got a LOT in during our three-day-week! But it isn't over yet. We have been supplied with some recap tasks to give us a little guided work over our longer break. I look forward to diving into that tomorrow!
My main take away from each day in Week Six.
Monday -
Monday we were introduced to jest and testing in general. I will take away the importance of unit testing but also the nice feeling of grasping the basics of a new language/tool!
Tuesday -
Tuesday gave us an opportunity to look deeper into test driven development. It has really helped me understand how to begin creating testable units/code.
Wednesday -
My main take away for Wednesday was the importance of end-to-end testing, specifically using cypress. I will also take the api testing knowledge from the supertest npm package experience.
The Long Weekend -
I will be spending my time going over the re-cap tasks from the bootcamp and spending some time with friends and family. I will be sure to also make time to work on some projects and research of my own (I just can't resist). However, I am aware some downtime is important.
If you've got this far, thank you! Week Six was a very short one! If you want to follow along with my journey please do. If you want to contact me for any reason also the best place to connect with me is Twitter - @_pattisoj. You can also find my GitHub here. I hope you have a good week and, as always, happy coding!