The other day I noticed I don’t follow any tech bloggers personally anymore. Some of that may be the rise of social media and aggregator sites filling the void but the bigger reason I think is that I haven’t been seeking out individuals to follow since around the time Coding Horror stopped blogging regularly. It’s a bit of a shame really since I think you can learn a lot by following individuals and seeing their own progression arc.

I’m finally getting around to putting down in words the testing philosophy I’ve developed over the years. Some of it might rock the boat a bit, other parts may be obvious to some folks, but what I’d like you most to take away is a reflection on your own testing philosophy and the tradeoffs your making. There’s no free lunch.

If you’re running a Next.js app and want to test it with Cypress you probably noticed a problem when it came time to test a server side rendered page. There’s no built in way to mock out requests made in getServerSideProps. When I ran into this and searched around for solutions I found this article that has a good explination of the problem (and diagrams), but I wasn’t satisfied with any of the solutions.

Have you ever had that brainfart moment when you’re writing code and forget what syntax you’re supposed to be using? An example is helpful:

You’re at the doctors office, talking to an acquaintance, or ordering something on the phone and they ask the question: What’s your email? Depending on your name, age, and your life choices this can be a breeze or the dreaded question. How long does it take before you have to break out the phonetic alphabet? How many times do you have to repeat it?