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Ruby Conf 12 - Boundaries by Gary Bernhardt

Confreaks · talk · Watch on YouTube

Testing, debugging & developer toolsSoftware architecture & designFunctional programming

What it is

Gary Bernhardt's RubyConf 2012 talk on testing in isolation without mocking everything. It goes through behavior versus data, mutation versus immutability, and how a functional core with an imperative shell yields natural isolation and parallelism.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN recommends it as the canonical presentation of 'functional core, imperative shell' and a practical answer to unit versus integration testing.

  • 8 people recommended it
  • 9 different months
  • 4 strong recommendations
  • first 2015, last 2024

What HN commenters said

  1. “Gary Bernhardt's awesome "Boundaries" talk”

    Great idea for making IO testable.

    pmarreck, 2016-04 · Strong recommendation · in “Have Software Developers Given Up?”

  2. “I can't more strongly recommend watching this video”

    Ruby talk whose ideas resonate with Elixir.

    dnautics, 2020-01 · Strong recommendation · in “Elixir v1.10”

  3. “Fantastic talk, fantastic presentation.”

    Gripping talk on imperative shell, functional core.

    AaronFriel, 2020-10 · Strong recommendation · in “A Theory of Software Architecture”

  4. “I've found the ideas in Gary Bernhardt's talk, Boundaries (1), to be very helpful in figuring out how to test interactive web UIs.”

    Imperative shell, functional core ideas for testing UIs.

    zachrose, 2015-03 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: Front-end “design patterns”?”

  5. “Also see Gary Bernhardt's "Boundaries" talk for more interesting thought in that vein”

    Pushing side effects to code boundaries as alternative to microservices.

    lectrick, 2015-10 · Recommendation · in “The microservices cargo cult”

  6. “I recommend watching this talk”

    Talk relevant to unit versus integration testing.

    itsmemattchung, 2016-03 · Recommendation · in “How to avoid brittle code”

  7. “reading your post reminds me of the presentation by Gary Bernhardt titled "Boundaries",”

    Related presentation on layered software.

    magicpat2010, 2020-05 · Recommendation · in “Ask HN: Organization of Layered Software?”

  8. “Some resources to further explore these ideas”

    Resource on functional core, imperative shell.

    aszen, 2020-10 · Recommendation · in “Prefer Fakes over Mocks”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: functional core imperative shell, gary bernhardt, testing, immutability, side effects

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