RSpec 3.x Goodness

RSpec 3.3 was released "way back" in June, but I just looked into it, and it provides a new "aggregate_failures" feature. This allows RSpec to run test setup code once for multiple expectations. This moves away from the "one expectation per example" pattern while still running all tests (normally, if you include multiple expectations in a single test, the first failing expectation will short circuit the rest). Used properly, I would expect massive performance increases with feature specs, in particular! In a similar vein, the 3.x series also introduces "compound expectations" for checking a result value against multiple criteria all at once via "and" and "or" composing methods. And if you haven't seen 3.0's "composable matchers", have a look!

Kill Process Group

When a UNIX process spawns child processes, they all belong to the same process group. And you can kill the whole process group at once using kill -9 -. The negation symbol in front of the PGID value is the key here. How did I not know this before? I always grep'd the output of ps and killed the individual processes.

Long vs Short Command Line Options

It's simple really. Don't use short options when invoking commands from scripts. Thanks.

Code Review

After watching RailsConf 2015 - Implementing a Strong Code-Review Culture, I realize my own code review process is perhaps much more heavy weight than it could be. In particular, I realize that I generally perform a full QA check on each pull request, doing my own manual testing, etc. I also focus heavily on finding bugs, unlike the presenter of this talk. Of course, if I scale back my CR efforts, I know there will be lots of defects that will make it into production, as my current team does not have a QA team at its disposal.