Cees de Groot

Anyway, your homework assignment is to (re)watch @jbrains@mastodon.social's "Integrated Tests are a Scam" talk - https://vimeo.com/80533536 (I'm linking to what I think is the original version of the talk on purpose here: this should have been common knowledge for at least this long. But there's newer vids and blog posts if you prefer). Just this - avoiding the integrated test pit - will help you drive your tests (and code) to a point very close to where you can be happy about your test suite.

We started using Claude code at work. In a reasonable way, I must say: let's give it a spin, see what it can do for us, treat it as a tool in the toolbox, not a developer-displacing silver bullet, etc.

Anyway, I was working on a ticket, took time to install the CLI, and then asked it to generate a test for some new code I wrote (usually I TDD, sometimes I code my way first to a solution, it depends. No silver bullets, just tools in the toolbox).

What happened next made me giggle, because the test was hilariously bad and full of all sorts of antipatterns.

What happened _next_ made me cry. I realized that Anthropic just scraped all the Elixir code it could get its hands on so the style of test its product generates reflects the general "state of the art" in the Elixir community.

Realizing that made me very sad. I guess it's time to write a blog post on proper test approaches in Elixir (too bad I cannot use Claude's code as a showcase as it is work code, it'd be a great exposition piece).

(cont)

It was fun to chat on @screwtape, thanks @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org for having me. Recording on https://toobnix.org/w/9otb9JbqRUenLUjK72viwf, next week it seems I'm gonna be grilled on my book, berksoft.ca/gol.

Oh, and congrats everybody in British Columbia for getting rid of one of the sillier modern inventions. I can only hope Ontario will be next but I'm not gonna place any bets on it.

https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ?si=wB78xV9E7UtFQSjU

Brilliant. #enshittification

Well, today is the day. I'm finally "sorta happy enough to pull the trigger" on publishing the book I've been working on for a very long time. It's a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for "tech-adjacent" and "tech-interested" people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy in 1958 and today still going strong (to the extent that many people see it as the most powerful programming language in existence).

And this is a time for shameless self promotion, even if you don't plan on buying the book, please repost :-). Self-publishing is self-marketing, so there we go.

If you do buy and read it, please let me know how you liked it!

The book landing page, https://berksoft.ca/gol, has links to all outlets where you can buy the book,