DevMountain

DevMountain - Week Eight

In our last week of classes we covered Test Driven Development (TDD) with Jake Trent and Firebase with Chris Esplin.

Obligatory quote…

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot

TDD

For those that have read some of my past posts, one of my few bug-a-boos has been the lack of TDD from the beginning. I’m glad we did cover it, and Jake’s coverage definitely helped my fill in some of my gaps. But I still wish we had utilized and addressed TDD from the beginning and in a much more integrated way. Despite Jake’s great intro, two days simply wasn’t enough TDD for me to say I’m ready to use it. With most of the other topics we’ve covered, actually with all of our other topics, I’ve felt like I had enough of a base that I can start using the technology right away. I had really, really been hoping that I would feel that way about TDD after we covered it. Alas, I don’t. The upshot is that I’m planning to stick with Angular and Node for the foreseeable future. In that vain, Seshadri & Green’s “Angular JS Up & Running” is very high on my read and do list, and thankfully they integrate testing with their coverage, than hopefully I’ll be more comfortable with it after that.

Firebase

On the one hand, Chris made Firebase seem awesomely easy and smooth. On the other hand, Firebase was having issues for some of us, and I was in the effected group. The result was that working code could write and read data from Firebase, but there was no way to see or interact with data in Firebase directly. Chris’ coverage was enough that the code we covered worked for me. Unfortunately, I tried later to build a small app from scratch and ran into bugs, but without being able to view my data, I couldn’t figure out what the problem was.

Blog note

We’re entering the project phase of our DevMountain bootcamp, so I won’t be making any more regular DevMountain updates. I plan to make one post after our actual course is over, and probably one last post in a few months.

Results

Like last week, most of the projects this week require a running server to view, so I’m linking directly to GitHub source code instead of a working demonstration of the page