Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills about web development.
My Ramblings This Week
How many people test your code before it gets deployed?
My number has been anything between two and four in the last several months. And we don’t have a dedicated tester on the team.
We have never shipped a broken product. I’m proud because we have been iterating aggressively on a legacy codebase.
Sure, there’s luck in the mix. But I attribute most of our success to one simple trick: verification steps. In each ticket, we keep a list of actions that anybody can perform to verify the code works as expected.
Before deploying, I wear the testing hat and test myself according to the steps. Then, depending on the feature’s criticality, I ask one or two people on the team to perform the same check.
This is not a 100% save-ass guarantee—we managed to break a few things on the way. But we never broke the application.
If that wasn’t enough, the list of benefits is waaay longer than that. I talk about that in The Simplest Most Powerful Trick–Verification Steps.
Elsewhere on the Web
Introduction to Terraform - A Practical Approach by Matthew Sanabria
This video introduces Terraform through a practical approach by walking through how a fictional company would use Terraform to manage their DigitalOcean infrastructure.
(Riccardo: If you heard about Terraform several times but never stopped checking it out, this is an excellent intro.)
Explaining Your Postgres Query Performance by Kat Batuigas
In a previous post, I talked about pg_stat_statements as a tool for helping direct your query optimization efforts. Now let’s say you’ve identified some queries you want to look into. The EXPLAIN command helps you look even closer into an individual query. If you’re already proficient in EXPLAIN, great! Read on for an easy refresher. If you’re less familiar with it, this will be a (hopefully) gentle introduction on what insights it might help provide.
(Riccardo: EXPLAIN is a tool to keep sharp in your web development toolbox.)
The TypeScript Handbook is intended to be a comprehensive document that explains TypeScript to everyday programmers. You can read the handbook by going from top to bottom in the left-hand navigation.
(Riccardo: This came out just a few days ago.)