Hey everyone and welcome to Developer Tea. My name is Jonathan Cottrell and today I'm going to be talking to you about the disposability of our computing resources. Have you ever felt like you weren't allowed to write some code because you hadn't planned it properly? Or because you hadn't explored all the options available to you before you started writing that code? This is something that can hold us back. If we think that we have to plan everything before we start writing code, then we forget that writing code is a process. One of my favorite celebrities, his name was Adam Savage, he probably wouldn't consider himself a celebrity. Or maybe if he does, then he doesn't really like calling himself that. But in any case, Adam says that when you are learning to be a maker, or somebody who is crafting with a lot of materials, you first must be ready to fail the first time. In other words, the very first time you're going to create something, go ahead and prepare yourself for failure. In fact, plan on it. The reason you need to plan on it is because, in Adam's world at least, you have to plan to have extra materials. Because some of the materials you use are going to be ruined by the initial. You're going to carve something wrong, or you're going to put something together or melt it because you're applying too much heat. You're going to put something together wrong. Any number of things can cause these materials to be expended. And so you need to plan for those extra materials. Now the same is true about failure for computer science, for programming. If you're trying to solve a problem, if you're trying to build something that's never been built before, out of the raw materials, you're going to have to plan for it. Out of the raw materials of code, out of the raw zeros and ones and memory structures, and out of the raw pieces of a programming language, prepare yourself to fail. Prepare yourself to fail. Now this also means that you need to come with an abundance of resources. But one of the great things about being a programmer is that these resources are much easier to get. In fact, all of our computers have these resources pretty much available at our fingertips. The thing is, we have an adversity to using them like they can be used. For example, when I'm testing a Rails application, I can spin up a database and create hundreds if not thousands of records in order to test my code with something like Factory Girl, for example. Now if you don't know what these things are, basically Rails allows you to test your database interactions by actually performing those database interactions on a test database. Some people don't like doing that. They don't like doing this. It feels weird. It feels like they're going to corrupt the database, or otherwise they're going to make a mistake. They're going to use up the resources of their computer. But that's just not true. With modern computers, there's no reason for us to not create new files before we have a perfect plan laid out. It's not the same as a world where those resources are limited. We don't have to plan in the same way that somebody carving leather has to plan. We don't have to bring extra resources with us because our computers already have that extra space. They already have those extra resources. So I'm encouraging you in this episode to start coding earlier. Start coding earlier in the process of planning. Your code will be an exploratory, experimental process if you do it this way. Now you might be thinking, how can I have exploratory or experimental code living on a project that is already well established, already working? I'm going to answer that question as soon as I get back from this quick sponsor break. Today's episode of Developer Tea is sponsored by DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean is simple cloud hosting built for developers. 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That's digitalocean.com. I've been talking a bit about the abundance of computing resources that we have at our fingertips and the importance of starting to work with actual code and even real data as early as possible so that your planning process is intermingled a bit with your coding process. Now, this can pose problems because if you already have a stable platform and you start coding before you have an exact plan or an exact structure for that code, you might introduce bugs that you're not aware of. So how do you protect yourself against this? Well, it's very simple. You write tests. You write tests for everything that needs to be tested and that needs to work in the future. And then you run those tests throughout the process of experimentation. This means that if your experiments break something, the tests that you wrote last week or last month, those tests should fail. So you need to write good tests, but make sure you're writing tests and that will catch and prevent errors from creeping into your code after the fact. This is what is called regression testing. It basically tests your old code when you add new code that could break that old code. Regression testing means having regression tests and having regression tests means that you can experiment with your code earlier in the process, which means you can learn faster and get past the failure state much quicker and much more efficiently. So to avoid having anxiety about creating new classes or creating new files or creating a test database or duplicating things over and over on your computer, you need to have regression tests in place that protect you from breaking old code and from introducing new bugs that you aren't aware that you are introducing. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. I hope it encourages you to start coding a little bit earlier because we have all of these resources that are available to us. Speaking of resources, check out DigitalOcean, today's sponsor. They provide a very fast and easy way to get up and running with a cloud SSD. Just 55 seconds. And if you use the code DeveloperTea today, you can get $10 off. So go check that out. All the links will be in the show notes. Thank you again for listening to today's episode. And until next time, enjoy your tea.