Intermediate Ruby: 🪄 for faster tests
Hello! You signed up for emails from me over on intermediateruby.com - ostensibly you are about software development, Ruby, and a bit more. I run two main websites, so you might also remember getting emails from me about general life stuff in the past, if you happened to sign up for both lists. This is for the software development side of things. If that's you, read onward! I have a question for you at the end.
A lifetime ago, I did a short tire-kicking experiment of 'helping companies make their tests go faster'.
I achieved very satisfactory success with two of those projects, and the third was a rather large and complicated rails app. I did not make a dent on it, but also barely any budget and time was available to work on it.
So, two out of three, I was pretty pleased. I've got notes here about what I learned.
I had huge self-worth issues then, and thought that someone paying THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS for this work was bonkers. Turns out software developers get paid thousands of dollars for their work all the time, and I "simply" was scared to ask directly for meaningful chunks of change, instead of getting hired full-time somewhere and enjoying the steady flow of money as part of W-2 employment.
I'm digging back into all of this work. I note that this simple test profiling/bench-marking/improving was some of the most fun I'd ever had. I really like mucking around inside the internals of a rails app.
Since many of us run tests every time a commit is pushed to Github, via CircleCI, depending on the rate of development of an application and the number of developers working on it... this time can add up, quite a lot.
I'll talk more about this as I do the work.
In the mean time, I have questions for you:
- How long do your tests take to run?
- Do you ever run the whole suite locally, or does it happen exclusively on CircleCI?
- how many developers are on your team?
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- Josh
PS The industry has been 'exciting' for the last year or two. Some of you maybe had jobs and no longer do, or have jobs and are still stressed about not having jobs. Or, of course, some of you maybe are still hunting for and wishing for your first software development job. How's your soul?