Best of 2021

10 Jan 2022 #writing

In 2021, I switched from posting whenever I had an idea about anything to posting regularly every other week about some topics.

I wrote a whole series of posts about unit testing. From how to write your first unit test with MSTest to what stubs and mocks are. In fact, I wrote my first ebook Unit Testing 101 with some of the posts of the series. By the way, you can download it for free. No email asked.

These are the 5 posts I wrote in 2021 you read the most. In case you missed any of them, here they are:

1. How to name your unit tests. 4 test naming conventions. This post is part of the Unit Testing 101 series. Four ideas to better name our unit tests. All of them, to write names easy to understand.
2. What are fakes in unit testing: mocks vs stubs. Again, part of Unit Testing 101. This post shows what fakes, stubs, and mocks are. It might sound difficult, but it isn’t.
3. TIL: How to convert 2-digit year to 4-digit year in C#. Last year, I worked with a Stripe-powered payment module in a reservation management system. And, I needed to parse card expiration dates from a 2-digit year to a 4-digit year. I almost just added 2000 to them. But I didn’t. This is what I found and did instead.
4. Decorator pattern. A real example in C#. My favorite pattern. This post shows how to implement a retry mechanism on top of Stripe API client.
5. A quick guide to LINQ with examples. I wrote this post to answer a friend. All you need to know to start working with LINQ in 15 minutes or less.

Voilà! These were your 5 favorite posts. Hope you enjoy them. Probably, you found digests of these posts on my dev.to account too.

Thanks for reading, and happy coding in 2022!