Today I am going to do something I have not done before. A couple months ago I was contacted by NDepend to play around with their software. I did not check but there is probably a fair amount of software reviews out there. Hence why I will try an hopefully different approach. A noob approach. I’ll read the promise from the software to review and just dive into it without any sort of guidance. Let’s call it Noob Review. Yep, that’s how you create a series that might or might not live longer than a post.

Hi everyone, it’s been exactly a month since my last post and I have a good excuse for it. As it turns out I was pretty busy with a wedding, a holiday and the beginning of a personal project. Yep, another one! From now I will refer to it as my Greek goddess gamble until I reveal what it is all about.

Tick, tick, tick look at me it’s Mister Ozymandie,
Once more bringing, no, inflicting my opinion upon thee.
Whatever the effort, the time you put in your source,
My remarks, of your good day, will disrupt the course.

No matter how close you were to a merge
It is time for me to compare with yours my verge.
I am the biggest, the best, better than the rest
The victim you will be of my self-esteem quest.

What is the HttpResponseSimulator? Apart from being the least original name. Well, it is a tool that allows simulating the behaviour you want from an endpoint to test an HTTP client and/or wrapper. I built it over an afternoon so that I could write a timeout test for an HTTP client wrapper. I had to get familiar with Node.js and Express again, which I previously used to create HappyPostman. Despite the slow start, it took me about a couple of hours to implement and deploy.

How I unblocked a frozen pull request

A few weeks ago, I saw a pull request to modify one of our web jobs which codebase is pretty old and had no tests. The pull request had no tests either. The thing is that we decided to make unit testing mandatory for any pull requests a couple of weeks before.

I started reviewing the code when I noticed someone else already posted a review. A pretty laconic “please add tests”. Not a bad nor a mean review but not a really helpful one. Proof of it is that it was posted about an hour before and the pull request was blocked. Indeed we do not untested logic to enter or remain in our software. Yes, it is aligned with our new policy about tests. That being said, the web job code was tightly coupled and pretty impossible to test as it was.