When I was nine years old, we learnt about a queen of an ancient British tribe. Her name was Queen Boadicea. Over 2000 years ago, she led an uprising against the Roman Empire. The uprising destroyed many Roman towns in Britain, but it ultimately failed. Because of this courageous leadership, she became legendary in Latin historical chronicles and Ancient British folklore. Boadicea is a Celtic word…

A great Unit Test covers the 3 R’s; Repeatable, Reliable, Resilient. One thing that does not help with achieving the 3 R’s are test cases that only work at a certain time. Jest has a way to mock timers in tests. In this article we’re going to look at how 3 of these methods work. — The Code Below is the code that we’re going to write tests for. This function takes in a “days” parameter and calculates the Unix Epoch time (the milliseconds that have elapsed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970).

Near the end of January 2023, Alphabet laid off 6.4% of its employees. Alphabet is one of the biggest companies in the world and most people are probably aware of this, so I won’t go into more detail. Some of the people let go lament about being treated like a Google Compute Engine cloud server being soullessly terminated. But what did they expect? Treated like an actual person instead of a resource? Let go with some dignity? Welcome to 9 to 5 serfdom. This is my lay off experience from October 2012. It’s been 10 years since I wrote this and I still had a lot to learn about writing. I also had a lot to learn about life. Nevertheless, I wanted keep the rawness of the text, so the editing is minimal.

Ever since I read Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, I have been a huge fan of John Carmack. I’m a huge fan of the Quake series as well as Doom. So reading about the architects of these masterpieces was breathtaking. Throughout reading the book, it became clear that John Carmack had a strong idea of what he wants to achieve. Almost an arrogance, most likely due to his incredible talent.

There is a lot of chatter now about the virtues of OpenAI’s new chat bot version, ChatGPT. It has a lot of practical uses. It can chat and it can write a biblical verse explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR. But can it write some code? Let’s find out. — Questions what is the best way to create an example of the Travelling Salesman problem? Imagine you want to go visit 10 cities as quickly as possible. But there are 100 different routes that you could take to get to each one, ranging in distances. How do you work out the…

In 1969 ARPANET was created by the US Department of Defence. This was the first packet switched network to use TCP/IP. This network was used to connect computers, first across the USA and then in 1973 to the rest of the world. These scientists were the first people that embraced remote working. Remote Working was for the benefit of mankind, a noble endeavour. In 2022, the energetic grandchild of ARPANET has a version of Remote Working, and it has gotten a bad rap. Over the past few years it became synonymous with wearing trackpants on a Zoom call. Mindless scrolling through a news feed with your camera off while you listen to updates from your boss. Workers seen as lazy for wanting the flexibility to work from a location other than an office.

Vitest is a JavaScript testing toolkit designed to make setting up, writing, and running tests easy. It’s packed with cool features which makes it a great alternative to Jest. — Without going into too much detail Vitest uses Vite. Vite is a build tool that allows developers to set up a development environment quickly. The biggest benefit is that it’s quick. Compared to other CLI tools like CRA or other Webpack-powered tools, Vite is fast. This makes Vitest a blazing…

Introduction Back in December 2020, version 3 of the AWS SDK for Javascript became generally available. This brought improved typings as it had been rewritten in Typescript. The introduction of a new middleware stack and a modular architecture made it easier to use. We can now import a specific package. In the v2 SDK, we had no choice but to import all the AWS services in one package. But it meant that there was a need for a whole new mocking library for creating unit tests.

Having a project structure set up already was something that helped me a lot when playing with code. There’s different ways to structure a project with unit testing in mind. In this short article I’ll go through one way. —