Happy to join us for a commit on our mission to pair with everyone as part of “The Rails Camp Project”, at Rails Camp Hobart, was Rob Jacoby.

In our last commit Brenton showed how to push a pending commit that would be allowed to, on purpose, not pass on a CI test server. This approach of pending specs allows to push regularily to master and hence real continuous integration (CI). Rob would write a ReactJS component to start the game and start his experiences in writing his first React code.

Quickly bringing Rob up to speed with our code base and testing approach, we gave him an opportunity to write some react.

Commit dde6ff8

Author: Rob Jacoby <robjacoby@users.noreply.github.com>
Date:   Sat Nov 24 18:10:14 2018 +1100

Add a button to start game

Co-authored-by: Selena Small <selenawiththetattoo@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Michael Milewski <saramic@gmail.com>

Since it’s still early days in building this project, we don’t have any complexity yet or any components for that matter. Brenton’s test is looking for a button on the page, any button, and to get this test passing for the time being all we need to do is add a button.

it('renders a button', () => {
  const wrapper = shallow(<App />);
  const button = <button>Start Game</button>;
  expect(wrapper.contains(button)).toEqual(true);
});

and for the button to contain the text “Start Game”, like what the test asks for.

<button>
  Start Game
</button>

We took an extremely small step here but the reality is that building out new features can sometimes feel like a series of unbeleivably small steps - especially when you’re not quite sure where you’re going yet.

In respect to the context of the task at hand, someone is always going to be less knowledgable and may even be refered to at times as the “junior” in that particular situation.

For this commit, Rob is the designated “junior” and in a good pairing environment, you want to encourage the “junior” to drive as much as possible. Since we’re not so far beyond “junior” ourselves in test driving React, getting anyone else to write their first bit of Test Driven React is certainly a challenge but we managed in the end!

5 minutes with Rob

Q: Rob have you written any React recently? what does your job involve these days?

A: Not really, I am mostly a reviewer these days, more so than a coder. I have also been more involved in writing the backbone of applications, core architectural parts and haven’t really done much feature work.

Q: You seemed a little surprised that we would be coding directly on master, how do you usually work?

A: We work with traditional feature branches and pass work over to QA (Quality Assurance) for further testing. Although I am really interested with the XP (Extreme Programming) work like you guys have shown me today

Q: How did you find the pairing experience with us?

A: The facade API you two have provided is that you are nice people!

Lolcommits

Finally with practic we had another go

Rob “I like how the gif has worked out, well centered”

Next time

We were starting to run out of simple dumb test implementation of text and buttons. A few more tests to setup up and very shortly we would need to get into some real functionality where those buttons actually start to make actions for rounds in our game. We hope you can join us next time.

Authored By:

Selena Small & Michael Milewski