Safety Nets: Learn to code with confidence

[toch]

Ruby gives you a great power, such as easy Duck Typing. As the saying goes, "With great power there must also comes great responsibility!" It comes at a price. We cannot afford to blow off everything when shipping. That's why it's important to put in place different strategies to help us to catch errors asap, but also to avoid the cruft long term. Like a safety net, they allow you to go forward with more confidence.

Tests are one of those safety nets, and it's a good thing they are well spread in the Ruby community. But this not the only ones. Tests cannot catch everything, we need to set up other ones. In this talk, I'll take a tour of various safety nets: Tests but also CI, code reviews, and static analysis. I'll focus on the benefits they give, how they work, what kind of problems they can catch, illustrating them with various real world experiences. People will walk away with several actions they can take to increase their confidence in their code.