All posts written by Fiona Burcombe
Spec-tacular: ways to think about writing expressive RSpec
Using RSpec's functionality expressively helps to draw focus to the right parts of a test, but it's not always easy to understand how best to use it. Continue reading
Naming Things Is Hard
Choosing good names for objects and methods in code is one of the toughest things to do as a software engineer. It comes with the great and invisible reward of simplicity – second only to having less code in the first place, having code that’s easy to reason with makes extending it and debugging it in incident scenarios all the easier. Of course, the opposite is true as well – code that… Continue reading
A refreshing take: using serverside rendering to reduce fragile DOM state
Hotwire is central to how we drive the frontend at FreeAgent, and Action Cable allows us to send Turbo Streams as users browse the site, adding a layer of richness to the user experience. Continue reading
Waiting for it with Capybara’s synchronize method
Feature specs are notorious for their potential to flake. It’s possible for the results of feature specs to be inconsistent because they have to deal with asynchronous state. In a typical test environment, there’s a single Ruby process at play, so test code will be executed in order as written – we can reasonably expect one line to complete before the next is executed. But when it comes to feature specs… Continue reading
The Other Copilot: Coding with AI
It seems Copilots are ten a penny these days. While our CoPilot accountant partners are a human way to support you using FreeAgent, the flight term has really taken off(!) as branding for AI tools, GitHub’s Copilot being just one of them. The rise of AI tooling for developers has sparked a lot of discussion and controversy as of late. It’s also seen rapid development and innovation, with several code… Continue reading