Barrel files are a popular pattern in Typescript projects for managing imports and exports. Rather than importing dependencies straight from the source file location, we add an intermediary index.ts file that re-exports a module’s dependencies. Barrel files let us shorten and simplify import statements, prevent the consumer from needing to…

While we strive for tasks that are independent of one another, interdependencies can be challenging to avoid in practice. Developers are often nervous about changing areas of the codebase also being worked on by other developers — and for good reason. It isn’t easy building on top of a shifting…

The simple mistake undermining Jest’s performance — Our team is a couple of months into developing a new application, and our suite of unit 240 tests takes 46 seconds to run. That duration is not excessive yet, but it’s increasing in proportion to the number of tests. In a couple of months, it’ll take a couple of…

Running tests for a front-end application is no trivial task. There’s TypeScript to compile, dependencies to mock, a virtual browser to run, and code coverage to track. Jest is a powerful ecosystem, but all of this functionality comes with a cost. Jest can be very slow, and while its default…

Code review has the potential to be one of the most impactful activities we do in our day. It ensures our codebase remains readable and maintainable, catches bugs, spreads knowledge across the team, and increases our confidence in what we are about to release. However, poorly structured code review processes…

Trunk-Based Development vs Feature Branching For how important branching strategies are, we don’t talk about them as often as we should. We pick our approach, alongside the core languages and tools, at the start of a project and then never think about it again. At most, we might make minor…

Creating a system that empowers your team. — Code reviews are one of the most productive tasks we do each day. When done well, they ensure code quality, promote knowledge sharing, and strengthen the team. Code reviews give developers the confidence that the code they contribute is as good as possible and let everyone in the team have…

Design your Retrospectives to match the Sprint and state of the team. — It had been a difficult Sprint, but the morning before Retro was even harder. A bad merge had clobbered what we had been intending to deliver that Sprint. Cleaning up that mess had left me without time to prepare for our Retrospective. So for the Gather Data step, I fell…

Features I wish I had known about earlier for developing, debugging, and improving the performance of my pipelines — Using the Azure CLI to queue builds Since there is no support for running pipelines locally, you need to commit each change to your repository and queue your pipeline to run within Azure DevOps. …