Introduction
Facile.it’s Technical Writing team attended the Write the Docs Prague 2021 conference which was held from 3rd to 5th October 2021. While the conference was usually held in the capital of the Czech Republic, for the second year in a row it was held remotely due to Covid-19 restrictions.
In this article we will provide a quick overview of the event.
What is Write the Docs Prague
Write the Docs Prague is the annual European conference organized by the Write the Docs community. There are usually 3 annual conferences organized by the community: Write the Docs Portland, Prague, and Australia & India. This year due to organizational difficulties the Australia & India event was cancelled and partially incorporated into the Prague conference.
These conferences allow all people involved in documentation (of any kind and in any field, but especially in tech field) to meet, exchange ideas, and keep up to date on the latest themes. These events are attended by tech writers, developers, support specialists, UX/UI designers, and many others. Therefore, to be inclusive and for simplicity’s sake, organizers like to talk about “Documentarians”.
The technical writer, this mysterious character
Let’s face it, being a technical writer (especially in Italy) makes you feel a bit like Barney Stinson from How I Met Your Mother: no one knows what your real job is. If you’re a tech writer, we bet you have at least one relative who, at every family gathering, asks you “What do you exactly do for a living?”. In the most desperate cases, even your mom doesn’t know what your job is!
Introduction
When we write a client to integrate an API in our systems it is important to test it to be sure we can handle every possible response.
Guzzle client provides a very simple way to mock external APIs responses: Guzzle Mock Handler. This tool provides a mock handler
that can be used to fulfill HTTP requests with a response or exception by shifting return values off of a queue.
Introduction
Imagine you need to use a fixed numeric value in your code, let’s say 20000. It is what we call a literal constant, that is a value that will always remain the exact same in your code.
Now imagine you need to use that value more than once. Sooner or later you will read your code and you will not remember what 20000 was, it will happen for sure. But what if you assign the value to an immutable variable with a meaningful name? Let’s say something like this:
Why do I need to test?
Everyone who works in software development has stumbled upon software testing.
Why should a developer know anything about testing?
Well, software testing is a valuable asset and a big part of development: it does not only test the application, it also teaches to think outside the box and to write code with quality in mind.
Software testing is not finding bugs
The goal of software testing is not only to find bugs and “break things”. Testing can range from a pure exploration of functionalities to a deep understanding of the tested application. Testing can give an idea of what, why and how the application is tested together with the guiding concept of quality.
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