I’d like to take a moment to document some recent realizations I have made regarding best practice when developing and testing applications. I’m finding that employing Redux and functional programming paradigms at work is really leveling up my software development skills.
These are exciting times!
I created an object-oriented solution that also took advantage of some functional programming practices. It is a black-box service that takes an industry, all of it’s products, and a store as initial arguments. Filtering and sorting actions taken by the user trigger internal methods that act on the data and update the store.
Development of these features took a few weeks. We took the next few months to iron out bugs, uncommunicated or forgotten business logic, and other edge cases that we wanted to address.
My first big Gartner project was to create an end-to-end testing platform for NEON, our shiny new Angular application. We decided to favor self-documenting tests and OOP over DRY page objects with magic helpers.
Benchmarking revealed our new E2E testing application is nearly 12x faster than the old platform. It also scales and is now far more maintainable.
I chose to use the technologies specifically listed in the job posting: Javascript, AngularJS, SASS, Git, and Node.js. I coded the store as an API for child components to retrieve data. The result is a non-trivial, reactive, SPA, all built from scratch in less than 12 hours.
Essentially the kata is asking us to fit a puzzle piece into an existing environment. Our piece sits between a REST API and some consumer set to call our `retrieve` function. The consumer will pass arguments. It will expect the data to be formatted a certain way and be wrapped in a promise. And we will be swimming in Node.js and ES6 Javascript!
