Hello! We’re already halfway through the year. I’ve let it get away from me. It’s been busy, both at the day job and otherwise. Not enough hours in the day. And too many projects. Here’s an update on one of them.

So I am working on a new book

If you follow my work over on Left of the Dev, you’re already aware that I’ve announced a new Rails testing book! I got curious about the state of the modern default Rails testing stack, vis a vis my muscle memory that adds RSpec as the first dependency to any new Rails app I create. The result is Testing Rails from Scratch: A practical, (mostly) out-of-the-box approach to test-driven development in Ruby on Rails.

That’s a mouthful. it’s very much a thought experiment: How to apply my now time-tested approach to learning TDD to Minitest and minimal additions to a default Rails 8.1 application?

And it’s a work-in-progress. The first three chapters are available now; the next few are coming shortly. It’s on Leanpub, like my RSpec book.

I had a nice chat with co-founder Len Epps a couple of weeks ago about the new book, and why learning to test is still useful.

Yeah, I guess that’s what I look like these days! Apologies for my janky camera–turns out it was on its last legs; since replaced.

My goal is to be done with the new book in September. Same deal as the RSpec book: Buy it once and get updates for as long as I keep up with it. (If you’re new to my work, I’ve been updating Everyday Rails Testing with RSpec for more than 14 years and making each release free for anyone who ever purchased. For what it’s worth.)