Tutorials on Dave Hogan

Reflecting on the need for Abstracting DateTime.Now

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 20:55:21 +0100

Unit Testing Newbie

When I first started taking unit testing more seriously (it was 13+ years ago, don’t fight me!) I didn’t understand how to test something when I was using DateTime.UtcNow. My tests worked then failed a while later.

I asked, on reflection, an embarrassing question on Stack Overflow. What made it embarrassing was that it showed my lack of understanding of non-deterministic values and testing code that used them. As I mentioned in this case it was usage of DateTime in C#.

Rewriting Entire Git Branch into a Single Commit

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 23:44:22 +0100

Squishing Everything Back to a Single Commit in Git

Ever wanted your Git history to go back to the initial commit while preserving the content you have today? For example, maybe you’re making a private repository public and want to remove the commit history but keep the current state. While a better option might be to create a new repository and commit everything fresh, if you really need to do this, here are the steps I took recently.

Gitflow Branching Strategy

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 16:41:46 +0100

This post was taken from a rough gist I created whilst strategising a GitFlow branching strategy in a new team setting. Views may have likely changed since then and no on-size fits all.

Introduction

However you and your team manages branches; it’s important to have at least some kind of strategy that everyone adheres to. Rules and process should be designed to keep things consistent within the team and changes flowing to avoid complex merges and other such issues with multiple work steams on a single code repository.

Bundling and Minification in ASP.NET Web Pages

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 13:07:57 +0100

This post was taken from a rough gist I created whilst battling bundling and minification back in Nov ‘23. Things have likely changed since then.

What is it?

Bundling and minification are optimisation techniques used to improve the performance of web applications.

Mainly by reducing the number of HTTP requests and decreasing the overall payload transmitted over the wite. We would typically do this for as many of our site-wide CSS and JavaScript files.