Wallaby Team Blog
Quokka has been a trusted companion to millions of software developers worldwide, providing instant feedback for sandboxing, prototyping, and learning, and making debugging smoother for more than seven years. Now, following the recent release of Wallaby v2, it’s Quokka’s turn to evolve.
Wallaby.js has been a trusted testing tool for nearly a decade, helping developers make testing faster and smarter. While Wallaby v1 has served many of you well, we imagined a future where testing could be even more streamlined and innovative.
In the last 18 months, AI for code generation has really stepped in as a game-changer. GitHub Copilot in particular, is reshaping how we write code, offering real-time code generation that’s akin to having a virtual pair programmer. But with great power comes great responsibility, and that’s where Wallaby.js comes in. Wallaby.js runs and validates your code before it’s even saved to disk and shows test results in your editor, right next to your code. Using Wallaby.js with GitHub Copilot ensures that what Copilot suggests isn’t just innovative but also reliable.
As you are modifying source code, you have to make assumptions about how certain bits of code that you are adding or accessing will function. At some point, the mental burden of unchecked assumptions becomes too much to endure, and you launch your app or run your tests to validate your changes. If the application/tests is in a working state at that moment, you may get the validation you need.
The world of software development is experiencing a rapid transformation, thanks to the increasing integration of artificial intelligence (AI) to help generate code. As developers face the challenges of meeting ever-growing user expectations and delivering high-quality software, the role of tools and AI-powered code generation will become more critical than ever. In this blog post, we explore the importance of Wallaby.js, Quokka.js, and Console Ninja, and how they complement AI code generation in streamlining the development process.
We are absolutely thrilled with the response that our new VS Code extension, Console Ninja, has received since its launch in the first week of December, 2022. We now have over 130,000 total downloads and more than 25,000 developers using it every week! We couldn’t be more grateful to the community for embracing Console Ninja with such enthusiasm.
The benefits of having a fast developer code-test feedback loop are time savings, efficiency, and reduced context-switching. With a fast feedback loop, developers can save time by getting immediate feedback on their code changes. This is especially useful when working on large projects with many files, as it can be difficult to keep track of all the changes. In addition, a fast feedback loop can help to improve efficiency by reducing the need for context-switching. When developers are able to get immediate feedback on their code, they can make more informed decisions about their changes and avoid wasting time on unnecessary edits. As a result, a fast developer code-test feedback loop can be a valuable tool for both time savings and efficiency.
We are big fans of TypeScript and have been using it for many years now in our own projects, as well as having created a deep integration with TypeScript for both Wallaby and Quokka. In our previous blog post, we looked at the importance of optimizing your tests to run faster. In this blog post, we’re going to dive a little deeper and discover how TypeScript can sometimes be a big culprit in slowing down your test feedback loop and provide some options for what you can do about it.
We recently volunteered our time to assist a group of high-school kids in our community who are new to coding. It was immediately clear that they did not understand the importance of the feedback loop that exists between writing code and knowing that the code does what was intended.
Today we’re excited to announce a really cool new feature called Output Inspector that is really going to improve your debug productivity. Output Inspector allows you to inspect logged values and error messages within your editor in a pop-out code window.
