My team and I are working on a React project that runs in regular browsers, and we recently decided to use Cypress for end to end testing. It has an actually surprisingly nice you can use to write describe-it style test scripts that will load up a browser with any page on your site, click some things, interact with the dom, and then even do assertions that your page renders correctly. You can do "cypress run" to run your tests via the command line or "cypress open" to start this little application from which you can run all tests or just specific tests, and it creates this little sidebar that gives you a history of the commands it's running and details about what happened when things have failed. Anyway, yes Cypress is awesome, but that's not what thing blog post was supposed to be about...

I’ve been working as a software consultant for the past few weeks, and an interesting thing happened.  The initial aggressive plan was to build a working prototype in 2 weeks that involved a React web front-end, Postgres db, and node backend api.  Well, we wanted to not do a complete faceplant so we were kind of forced into cutting corners and optimizing for speed.  For that reason and also since one of our three engineers was somewhat of a Ruby expert we thought it was be a quick win to quickly build out the backend api in ruby on rails. This post is me reflecting on my experiences today pair programming in Ruby on Rails.

I had developed a nice front-end website in Angular 7 for Kate From HR and was so excited that it was finally deployed live! However, I was having this strange issue where the routing was not working. The base url would work, and clicking on links would load the other pages. When I entered a url directly in the address bar though it would just bring me to a 404 page! Oh dear, it was bad times indeed. However, I figured out how to fix it so it's all happy days again!

I went on an interview today for a senior dev position at a large bank by world trade center today, and it was a great experience. They had an open floor plan and everyone had a super-wide monitor which looked pretty awesome. There were stocks shows playing on tv's  hanging from the ceiling and people were relatively dressed up, but the people who interviewed me seemed nice. I probably won't get an offer because the one interviewer asked me TWO relatively simple Angular questions that kind of stumped me. I don't think I would have really liked it there for  long but big thanks to this person for pointing out these gaps in my knowledge. 

People ask me, "Jim, if you want to do typescript and node.js they why do you waste you time learning about functional languages like Haskell and Clojure?