Grab a bowl of buttery popcorn because the saga continues! The end of the previous chapter saw our intrepid little Rails app camping happily on Heroku. This latest chapter in the hosting chronicles brings with it a twist: not just a change in host, but a complete migration from one programming language to another.
The app is no longer on Heroku, and it’s no longer written in Ruby or Rails. It’s written in JavaScript, hosted by Netlify, and it’s getting by with a little help from its new friend, Vue.js.
Onward for the Why’s, How’s, and Gottchas of the switch.
Refactoring is the lifeblood of a nimble codebase, but we need to stop hand-refactoring via Ctrl-C/V and start using our automated refactoring tool. Prepare to be convinced, then watch in amazement as you memorize your favorite refactoring tools’ keyboard shortcuts in two hours flat – and remember them forever.
You need an automated refactoring tool Refactoring without tests is dangerous Refactoring without tests and without an automated tool is like walking a tightrope over Niagara falls without a safety net - with your product and entire team standing on your shoulders.
“What in the world… is this refactoring thing?” The question hung in the air one crisp overcast morning, intermingled with the varied roars and toots of stressed out commuters accelerating to merge onto the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. I’d recently ventured out from the lonely homestead of solo-cowboy programming and moved to a big-ranch team of seasoned developers. The term “refactoring” ricocheted in and out of every other tech-speak paragraph while they wrangled big sections of legacy code and pondered the design implications of introducing a new feature into the system.