Why I Write My Tests First

There's a lot of testing tools for Ruby on Rails. Ruby started life with a strong testing culture. The ecosystem is brimming with tools. But not all of those tools spark joy. I love a lot of them. I've written about my nostalgia for Cucumber. But one tool that always make me feel weird is Shoulda matchers.

There's a quote that's been nagging at me for the last month. I recently watched a talk from Allen Holub. In it he says, "You can't be agile when you're fighting your code." That line has been stuck on repeat inside my brain ever since.

I've done a lot in my career. From working on business support software to big backend systems and even robotics. If there's been a consistent through-line to my career, it's the Ruby programming language.

Last week, I deployed a complete redesign of my personal website. I wrote briefly about the design decisions and iterations that went into the redesign. But, I also wanted to talk about the technical decisions of this redesign.

Yesterday, I merged a redesign of my website and so far, people seem to really like it. This was a multi-week project to bring some new life to my website and fix some accessibility and technical issues. I also wanted to explore some modern CSS features. This was a really fun project and I think the new site is much better than the old one.