WILT: Week of 1/5/2024

WILT: January 4th

Embracing Domain-Driven Design with Hasura v3

In my constant crusade to outsmart the mundane, I've been diving headfirst into the land of Hasura v3. It's like finding a toolkit under the Christmas tree - a set of tools designed to make life easier, but with an instruction manual that's somewhat... evasive. The key takeaway, though, is that Hasura v3 is less about piecing together a data jigsaw puzzle and more about creating a coherent story for different teams in an organization. Think of it like turning a cubist painting into a narrative; each team – User Experience, Fulfillment Services, Payment Processing – becomes the protagonist of their own chapter, armed with their specific data and operations.

Bridging the Gap with TypeScript Connectors

In the often-bewildering world of APIs, I stumbled upon a gem: the TypeScript connector in Hasura v3. This nifty feature lets code poets like us script functions in our beloved TypeScript, influencing the tale within our GraphQL API.

Suppose you have a team that's as obsessed with hospitality as a five-star concierge. They want every user to receive a unique greeting. Old school? Maybe. But with TypeScript functions, you can craft a greeting algorithm that feels more like a handshake than a form letter. Imagine a function like this (simplified for sanity's sake):

function determineGreeting(userPreference: string): string {
switch(userPreference) {
    case 'formal':
      return 'Good day to you, esteemed user.';
    case 'casual':
      return 'Hey there, friend-o!';
    default:
      return 'Hello, valued visitor!';
  }
}

This is the beauty of it all. A front-end developer can now include this personalized greeting directly in their query. The backend does the heavy lifting, and the front-end remains blissfully unburdened—an elegant symphony of separation of concerns.

The Unanswered Queries of Function-Model Relationships

As per my daily debrief, my brain is itching with intrigue about the relationship dynamics between these TypeScript functions and the data models. There's a bit of a foggy area there. It's like trying to predict the weather – sometimes you've got clear skies, and sometimes a tornado drops in to say "hi". I’m pondering how deeply these functions can intertwine with the tables and data that describe the structure of each team's domain.

Reflecting on Software Craftsmanship and TDD

It wasn't all GraphQL and team-based architectures. My grey matter got a good jog with the philosophy laid down in "Clean Coder" by Uncle Bob Martin. A shift away from pure code-smithing, the tome nudges us developers to ascend from mere keyboard warriors to knights of the round (office) table – professionals of the digital age.

Test-Driven Development (TDD): The Red-Green Refactoring Mantra

Here comes an acronym that promises more than productivity: TDD. I'm not keen on trends that don't deliver, but TDD's tune was catchy enough to stop me in my tracks. It's like learning a new dance – you step on a few toes (the red), hit a groove (the green), and then jazz things up (refactor). As I set up a new TypeScript project and cuddled up with Jest for my hands-on TDD, I could taste the potential for cleaner, more robust code. Here's a morsel to chew on:

describe('greeting function', () => {
  it('returns a formal greeting', () => {
    expect(determineGreeting('formal')).toBe('Good day to you, esteemed user.');
  });

  it('returns a casual greeting', () => {
    expect(determineGreeting('casual')).toBe('Hey there, friend-o!');
  });

  it('returns a default greeting', () => {
    expect(determineGreeting('')).toBe('Hello, valued visitor!');
  });
});

This is me turning software development into a feedback loop of quick learning and adapting, where tests drive the code structure and ultimately lead to more maintainable, happier code. A tad over-optimistic? Perhaps. But who says cynicism can't come with a side of code quality?

Closing WILTs and Coding Voids

In the spirit of 'What I Learned Today', I took a micro-moment each day to log my digital discoveries and mental facepalms. I'm aiming for a mixtape of meaningful reflections and, let's be honest, some trite trivia – because consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and my mind is a veritable goblin den.

So, to anyone looking to spice up their procedure: embrace the chaos of learning, wield red-green refactoring like a lightsaber, and maybe, just maybe, accept that you may end up a bit more Jedi master than scruffy-looking nerf herder. But as always, take that with a grain of salt - optimism is great and all, but let's not sugarcoat the struggle that is software development.