Christophe is C?O and CoFounder at PullReview, an automated code review for Rubyists.
He's a Ruby and C++ developer. When he doesn't code disease simulators or PullReview, he helps other when facing dev challenge, he writes on 8th Color blog, he co-organized and coached the 2nd Rails Girls Brussels, and he has given talk at user groups.
He enjoys a lot of stuff and discussing them.
Ruby gives you a great power, such as easy Duck Typing. As the saying goes, "With great power there must also comes great responsibility!" It comes at a price. We cannot afford to blow off everything when shipping. That's why it's important to put in place different strategies to help us to catch errors asap, but also to avoid the cruft long term. Like a safety net, they allow you to go forward with more confidence.
Tests are one of those safety nets, and it's a good thing they are well spread in the Ruby community. They should be not the only ones. Tests cannot catch everything, we need to set up other ones. In this talk, I'll take a tour of various safety nets: Tests but also CI, code reviews, and static analysis. I'll focus on the benefits they give, how they work, what kind of problems they can catch, illustrating them with various real world experiences.
People will walk away with several actions they can take to increase their confidence to build and maintain code.
I gave a simpler version of the talk at BRUG and Paris.rb.
It's accessible to Junior Developers.
Even it's not rocket science, "safety nets" are the product of experienced and mature development. Nobody wants to blow off your production, or to be caught up by legacy system. Even if it's shown their worth, it's not practiced by everybody often because their not aware or the lack of habits.