The Problem

We wrote an app that needed a personalized neural network for different users. Training a neural network with user data takes a long time. A trained neural network is a function. Most databases won’t store functions.

Rabbit Holes

One day you come up with a great idea for a little project. You figure you already have all the tools and knowledge you need to get it done in a few hours, settle in with some snacks, and get started.

Calculating the Fibonacci sequence is one of the first programs many people learn to write once they’re past Hello World. Of course, there are many ways of solving this problem; for example, it can be solved iteratively, or recursively. I was curious if my intuitive expectations about the performance of a few different methods were correct, so I wrote five different programs that all return the nth Fibonacci number and put them to the test.

SpeckJS is “an npm module that parses JavaScript comments and outputs unit-tests.” It allows you to implement TDD into your projects quickly and efficiently from within you main js files.

If you’ve spent any time writing JavaScript in the last couple of years, you’ve likely at least heard of Gulp.js. Smashing Magazine has an excellent introduction to Gulp that I strongly recommend reading if you are new to this build tool.

This week my team and I started in on a project to build a semi-automated grocery list app. I won’t be going into the details of everything the project entails, but one of the things we wanted it to do was to predict whether or not an item should be added to a user’s shopping list. Right away, we thought about using a neural network to add this functionality…the only problem was that none of us had used a neural network before.

This week I learned how to use Auth0 to authenticate an AngularJS/Node.js app. Auth0 provides a fairly clear tutorial for the initial front- and back-end set-up, but a few of the later steps proved a bit trickier, in part because some of the information in the Auth0 documents for the Google API is a bit out of date. Here is a quick visual guide to supplement that provided by Auth0 once you’ve finished the initial setup.

WARNING: You are now entering the “Project Phase”.

This is the third part in a short series on applying test driven development to a JavaScript program using Mocha, Chai, and Sinon. Part 1 and Part 2 gave a general overview of TDD and a brief walk-through of how to set up a testing environment. Part 3 will give a step-by-step example of the TDD process. I strongly recommend following along with your own code if you have yet to implement TDD at on your own, so if you have not set up your environment using the process described in Part 2, I suggest doing so before reading this post.