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?