React Redux Thunk vs Elm

Introduction

It’s a bit easier to learn Elm if you compare it to things you know. If you know React and Redux, then comparing them can help a lot to understand Elm concepts. I’ve built the same application in React Redux Thunk and Elm so we can compare them together. The end result is a table of things you can paginate through. Comparing these 2 applications is apples to apples. They’re identical to the end user. Yet the technologies behind them are apples to oranges. Seeing those deviations using familiar tech in the same application can help your understanding.

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Advent of Code 2018 in Elm Review

Introduction

I participated briefly in the Advent of Code 2018. Every year, they post 31 coding puzzles, 2 per day. You have to solve them before you can proceed to next one. I wanted to post about what I learned. I’ve never participated before, and wanted to use it an excuse to force myself to use a Functional Programming language. I use Functional Programming concepts in my day job, but never had the opportunity to immerse myself, and force myself, to accomplish harder challenges in a pure FP language. It was doubly hard because the exercises are NOT what I do at my day job at all and are challenging. They were very hard in a fun way, though. Below I’ll cover the 6 exercises I did (I threw in the towel on Day 7), and explain some of the interesting nuances I found either with the exercise and thinking in FP… and thinking in Elm.

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Functional Programming Unit Testing in Node – Part 5

Noops, Stub Soup, and Mountebank

Welcome to Part 5 where we cover more about noops with a utility to test them, the “stub soup” that can happen if you don’t create small pure functions, and how we can utilize stubs instead of mocks to unit test larger functions. The most important part, though, is setting up Mountebank to show how integration tests can show problems in your unit tests despite 100% coverage. We use wrapping class instances as an example to show you the pitfalls Object Oriented Programming code can make for you.
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