10 Years of Open Source

On June 4th, 2011 I released the first version of Virtus, a ruby gem that I extracted from the DataMapper project. I remember how I felt about Open Source back then, and I have to tell you that my perspective has changed a lot. 10 years, a freaking decade, is a lot of time…I’ve gone through a lot of ups-and-downs during that time, as my open-source contributions sky-rocketed, and that changing perspective is something I continuously think about....

June 4, 2021 · 10 min · Peter Solnica

The 5 Rules of Simple RSpec Tests

The 5 “rules” I try to follow in order to write simple RSpec tests. Let’s GO. 1. Max 2 levels of describe/context nesting Everything above 2 is a code-smell and causes alarm bells in my head to ring. The more levels of nesting you have, the harder it is to understand what a given example is doing. If you add before/after hooks to the mix, it’ll become even worse. I often reduce nesting by simply using example descriptions like that:...

May 11, 2021 · 5 min · Peter Solnica

TDD Is Fun

Today DHH published a blog post about TDD being dead (to him at least). It’s really not that surprising since from what I know (please correct me if I’m wrong) David’s experience is mostly based on building web apps with Rails. I get that, I really do. For me practicing TDD in a rails environment is much harder than when I work on my OSS libraries. There are many reasons why TDD in Rails is just a bit harder than it could be but that’s a big, separate subject....

April 23, 2014 · 4 min · Peter Solnica

Common Pitfalls Of Code Metrics

Code metrics and code metric tools can be both helpful and harmful. The difference between the two is learning to interpret the results and use the feedback to improve yourself and your code. I have a lot of experience with code metric tools. Over the last couple of years I’ve used them on a daily basis. Tools measuring simple things like test coverage, lines of code [LoC] per class/method, naming, and column length along with more advanced measurements for code complexity, churn, and mutation coverage....

January 22, 2014 · 8 min · Peter Solnica