Month: February 2015

We use Git Flow as our VCS process, which means that we develop on feature branches and merge those branches back into the master branch as part of our code review. It’s useful to delete these branches as they’re merged, because then anyone can see what is being worked on or needs code review by listing remote branches without being distracted by old branches. However, it’s easy for a reviewer to forget to delete the branches when they do the merge. These Git commands delete old branches that have already been merged with the “master” branch:

Delete local branches:

git branch –merged master | grep -v master | xargs -n1 git branch -d

Remove local tracking branches of remote branches that have already gone:

git prune

Remove remote branches that have been merged:

git branch -r –merged master | sed “s#origin/##” | grep -v master | xargs -n1 git push origin –delete

We’ve just had an impromptu developer meeting because a power cut disabled all of our computers.

We discussed Test-Driven Development (TDD). Rhys talked about how mocking with a framework like Mockito makes test driven development easier to achieve, because you can use the mocks to check the side-effects of your code. Inigo felt that needing to use mocks was often a sign that your code had overly complex dependencies, and that it was sometimes better to instead make methods and components “pure” – so they didn’t have side-effects. Nikolay mentioned having used a .NET mocking framework, that might have been Moq, for testing some C# code that had a dependency on the database. Charlie discussed the problems of using an in-memory database that had slightly different behaviour from your actual database.