RSpec, Heroku, and nine weeks in

Introduction

No rest for the driven. I recently picked up The RSpec book from The Pragmatic Bookshelf. I’m excited to jump into it; being a “wild west” developer for so many years, I’ve found it difficult to switch from a “shoot first, test later” approach. Even after following tutorials for days, I can’t seem to wrap my head around writing my own tests without referencing other apps. Which is fine… but I’d like to understand what exactly I should be testing instead of following a “put the puzzle pieces together” approach. So far, the book is very enlightening. It’s written by the author of RSpec himself, with contributions from the developer that wrote Cucumber, and proves to be enlightening stuff. If you didn’t read yesterday’s post, my first app is live-ish! Check it out here: http://psst.fm. Note that it is completely bare bones; the main thing with hosting this app was testing out how to publish an app via Heroku and overcoming any troubles that brought. Long term goals for this app include hosting a fully functioning URL shortener with user authentication and pretty graphs for hosted link analytics. Even longer term, I plan on including an API and potential WordPress plugin to replace the JetPack plugin I’m currently using to share links across social networking sites.