It was a week of state machines. Two separate Rails projects, two separate state machine libraries (state_machines and aasm), both sending emails. One is a fairly straightforward project for a department of education, it’s an old codebase but Objective built it and has been working on it ever since. As such, it’s fairly clean and straightforward for it’s age. I think that the more contractors and firms a codebase passes through the more muddled it gets. I’ve been working on this codebase for about two years now. The entire time I’ve been working to convert an old paper process to a digital one, it’s not an overly ambitious project but the budgeting has necessitated a slower pace of development. With only a few months left in the yearly budget (in education I guess the fiscal year ends with the school year) I was asked to quickly implement a form that allows users to draft a custom email message and attach a PDF. It’s been a while since I’ve done this with Rails, my last experience doing so was in the Paperclip days and that was not too fun. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with ActiveStorage, it’s much more plug-and-play then I recall (I’ve also been developing a lot longer now).
The other project is far more involved, my new full-time at gig at Built. It’s been exciting to work in tandem with another developer who has been handling the front-end work. Coming from a small agency I’ve always developed features full stack. Part of why I wanted to switch to a dedicated product team was to have experiences like this one where a greater degree of planning and coordination between developers was required. I started by creating a model last week and writing as many tests as I thought would be relevant. I’ve been through TDD phases in the past; but I think in small teams and projects TDD offers diminishing returns. It makes a lot of sense in a scenario like this, even on a fairly small team, since I’m developing features that I can’t be able to test in the browser until the other developer has her features in place. She in turn won’t be able to know if the front end works until my code is merged into her branch. This feature was the bulk of my week but it came together in time for some Friday afternoon QA of which I’m sure there will be several things to fix on Monday morning.