It is the kind of code that makes you squint. It could be that stray business logic in a controller, a view that queries the database, or even two intertwined features that change for different reasons. I am talking about code that is hard to read. Cryptic code slows everything down. It is the thing that makes a seemingly simple feature take weeks. Though we all can recognize unreadable code, it seems to keep showing up in our code-bases.

So I would have considered this crazy a few years ago, but I wrote my own mock framework in Elixir called ExDoubles. I know, I know, there are tons of them already, but hear me out. This one seeks to act like mock libraries in other languages, and put focus on the key element of abstraction in Elixir, the function. Why? Why? Why? I have been working in Elixir for the last six months, after years of Ruby and C#.

So you have written an implementation for that new feature in your Rails app, but your team won’t accept your Pull Request until there are unit tests. What’s more your changes are to private methods of a class. In frustration you shout, “How do I test this code?” Testing private methods may seem difficult when not using TDD, but this article gives you two strategies: “testing via the public interface”, and “move methods to a different class”.