Within the TDD community there’s an advice saying that we shouldn’t mock types we don’t own. I believe it is good advice and do my best to follow it. Of course, there are people who say that we shouldn’t mock in the first place. Whichever TDD camp you’re in I think this “don’t mock what you don’t own” advice has an even better advice hidden in it. An advice that people often overlook because they see the word “mock” in it and go full berserk.

This past weekend I was playing around on some pet projects and wanted to get up and running quickly. My initial reaction was to reach for a Vagrant box provisioned with Ansible. After all, that’s what I’ve been using for a really long time now.

I’ve used recently PHPDocker.io to generate a set of Docker files for a pet project and it had the option to use MySQL 8 and of course I went with that. The problem was when I wanted to connect to the database that was on this MySQL 8 server.

Back in October last year I wrote that I thought I understood bounded contexts, what they are and why we need them. Ever since realizing that a bounded context is a boundary of how a business sees a specific subject within a section of that business, learning anything and everything DDD became a lot easier.

I’ve been toying around with Docker for the past couple of days, mostly to learn more about it, to understand it better. I just didn’t bother with it until now.

In dealing with legacy code I often come across some class that extends a big base abstract class, and the methods of that class call methods on that big base abstract class that do an awful lot of things. I myself have written such classes and methods in the past. Live and learn.

I’ve been using VS Code for my Golang development needs for a few months now. Minor kinks here and there, nothing serious, and the development experience gets better with every update. I have also tried out IntelliJ Idea as the editor, and one feature that I’m missing in Code from Idea is the build-run-reload process. I thought to myself, that’s such a basic feature, it should be possible to have that.

As any newcomer to Golang and it’s ecosystem, I was eager to find out what is this hubbub about these things called goroutines and channels. I read the documentation and blog posts, watched videos, tried out some of the “hello world” examples and even wasted a couple of days trying to solve the puzzles for day 18 from Advent of Code 2017 using goroutines and failed spectacularly.

Sometimes when working with Mockery mock objects, we want to tell a mocked method to return different values for different arguments. It is a rare occasion when I need this feature, but every time I need it, I’m happy it’s there.

A week or so ago, Luka mentioned this Advent of Code thing. I’ve been doing coding challenges and examples before, but never have I tried the AoC (this is the third year it’s running).