> The discovery of unit testing and test-driven development was one of the
> most important parts of my growth as a developer. The ability to write
> simple, small pieces of code that could verify the behavior of my
> application was in itself quite useful. And the ability to refactor without
> fear, just by running the test suite, changed how I program. But the real
> benefits come in how unit tests shape your application code: more testable
> code is often more well thought-out, more decoupled, and more extensible.

> In this talk, I'll give a whirlwind introduction to unit testing as a
> concept and as a practice. I want you fully convinced it's the best thing
> to happen to software development, if you aren't already. Once we're on the
> same page there, I'll take a deep dive into what makes a *good* unit
> test. This involves testing tools such as spies, stubs, and mocks, concepts
> like code coverage, and practices like dependency injection that shape your
> application code. The most important lesson will be on how to focus on
> singular, isolated units of code in your testing, as this guides you toward
> building modular, flexible, and comprehensible applications.

> *Client Side Unit Testing for Single Page Applications* with John K. Paul<http://johnkpaul.com/>
> *
> *

> The unit testing web developer population, in general, has been growing by
> leaps and bounds, but sadly those gains haven’t been as steady on the
> client side.  I’d like to address a few of the reasons why that is, and how
> we can change that by unit testing our client side application code as
> thoroughly as possible.

> Most unit testing examples focus on very straightforward imperative tests.
> I have seen many explanations of JavaScript unit testing that describe how
> to verify the logic behind a calculator or a form validation library, but
> not how to test a more complex, event triggered application.  I’ll walk you
> through a simple unit tested Backbone application and explain some design
> tips for effectively unit testing your code along the way.  After that, I
> will explain how to effectively mock Ajax requests and trigger Ajax events
> from your unit tests.

> I will also be giving a short introduction to the grunt build tool. I’ll
> show you how to setup grunt in such a way that your test output can be
> easily integrated with your continuous integration suite as well as run
> every time you change a file.  Hopefully, eventually, we’ll all be able to
> have the confidence inspired by the green and red lights on a build
> monitor, on both sides of the great HTTP divide.

> This class is intended for those with some basic knowledge of JavaScript,
> interested in an introduction to the Node.js ecosystem and development
> platform. We'll discuss how to get started with Node, and why you would
> want to. We'll then explore Node's module and package system, demonstrating
> several of the more popular and impressive packages that exemplify the type
> of tasks Node excels at. These include low-level HTTP streaming with the
> http module, high-level bidirectional websocket communication with
> socket.io, and server-browser code sharing with browserify, jsdom, and
> node-canvas.

> Basic knowledge of JavaScript preferred, but not necessary: this course is
> intended to be a useful introduction for nontechnical types as well,
> explaining why Node.js would benefit their technical team.