LinLog

Another quick note to my future self: setting up Git under Windows to use SSH key authentication is pretty easy...once you know what to do.

At work, we have some Composer and Bower packages that we fetch from our internal GitHub Enterprise server.  And, of course, all the source lines in the composer.json and bower.json files use SSH references.  I just use HTTP for my code checkouts, so I finally had to figure out how to make Git for Windows authenticate with my SSH key.

Turns out it's pretty easy.  I have a key pair I created with PuTTYgen.  All I had to do was export my private key to OpenSSH format and copy that file to C:\Users\<my_username>\.ssh\id_rsa.  Git picks it up with no further configuration.  Then I just added my key to GitHub and I was good to go.

Today I watched a very interesting talk on good and bad unit testing practices by Roy Osherove, entitled "Unit Testing Good Practices & Horrible Mistakes in JS".  It really was an exceptional talk, with some good, concrete advice and examples.  I highly recommend it.

I actually recognized a couple of the examples in the talk.  The big one was OpenLayers.  I still remember being horrified by their test suite when I was using that library at my last job.  We had a number of extensions to OpenLayers and I was thinking about adding some tests into their test suite.  Then I ran the tests and saw a bunch of failures.  Assuming our code must be bad, I tried a fresh copy of the OpenLayers release.  A bunch of tests still failed.  And that's when I gave up and decided to just pretend their tests didn't exist.

If nothing else, the talk provided some nice validation that my JavaScript unit testing practices aren't completely wrong and stupid.  I've been writing unit tests for my JavaScript as part of my standard process for the last six months or so, and I was actually watching the video waiting for the hammer to drop, for Roy to describe an anti-pattern that I'd been blissfully propagating.  I was pleased and somewhat surprised when that moment didn't come.