I’ve been working through Stephen Grider’s React Testing Library and Jest course and stumbled on something that will clean up my tests: the within() function. There are many times when I find myself drilling into a part of a component to test something nested inside another element. I might take two or three hops to get there: import { within, screen } from '@testing-library/react' const table = screen.getByRole("table") const rows = within(table).getAllByRole("row") This takes two lines and, more importantly: It isn’t immediately clear what I am doing I declare the table constant when it isn’t relevant to anything With within(), you can shorten this to a single readable line: ...

I really like the way that I can nest my JavaScript tests using describe blocks. This keeps my tests nicely organized and grouped together in functional blocks which can be super useful when you get a whole lot of tests created. describe("my component", () => { describe("validation", () => { it("ensures that user name is provided", () => { // test here }) it("ensures that password is valid", () => { // test here }) }) describe("when saved", () => { it("displays an indication that mutation is in progress", () => { // test here }) it("provides feedback of success", () => { // test here }) it("provides an error message on failure", () => { // test here }) }) }) I was not aware that you can do something like this in Java with JUnit. Reading through Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java with JUnit I found that this functionality is available by making an inner class and using the @Nested annotation. ...

As a former Ubuntu user turned Mac user, I enjoy the bash terminal and POSIX command line that my Mac comes with. I also like the polished user interface that my Mac GUI provides for the times that I don’t want to think about what my computer is doing, I just want it to work I use iCloud on my Mac to store files and access them across multiple devices. One thing that I noticed early on is there there is a Local and an iCloud version of folders like Documents and that accessing the iCloud version is not-so simple from your home directory. ...

Today I was coding in Java and I came across a part of the code where I was using a byte literal. I’ve been using Java for a while, so I knew that you have to suffix long literals with an ‘L’ otherwise Java complains. long myLong = 3000000000L; // Java is happy long myOtherLong = 3000000000; // Java is sad (too big for int) So when I went to create my byte literal I figured I would need to put a suffix on the number, like I do with long literals. But when I tried it, it turns out I didn’t need to. ...

I like writing notes. I like writing them in markdown. There is something wonderful about the power and simplicity of markdown formatting to transform my readable text files into elegant pages. VS Code is a great tool and has markdown editing and preview bundled in for free. If you haven’t tried it, open a Markdown file and choose Markdown: Open Preview to the Side. This will open up a preview window to the side that will show you a transformed version of your markdown. ...