by Emily Bache | Jan 7, 2026 | Opinion
Here’s a question for you. What is the difference between a Spy and a Partial Mock? How about a Strict Mock? Test Double? Stub? What if I code it by hand instead of using a framework. Does that make it a Fake? Actually, I don’t think so! The language around...
by Emily Bache | Dec 19, 2025 | Coding Skills
Refactoring is one of the most impactful skills I teach in my work as a Samman Technical Coach. I do a lot of Learning Hour training sessions to teach particular refactorings. Sometimes these sessions go better than others, and until now I was improving them only...
by Emily Bache | Dec 8, 2025 | Opinion
Kent Beck is one of the original authors of JUnit, an open source tool that kick-started a huge shift in programmer behaviour that I and others have found immensely valuable. In 2019 he published his “Test Desiderata” with advice about the properties he...
by Emily Bache | Dec 4, 2025 | Coding Skills
(this post is designed to accompany my video “The Skill That Separates Good Developers from GREAT ONES”) AI coding agents are rather good at coming up with syntactically valid, working code these days. It also does design, reasoning about how to arrange...
by Emily Bache | Oct 31, 2025 | Coding Skills
How to Succeed with Technical Coaching Software Developers are constantly shifting between activities. It might all be ‘coding’ but when you look more closely there are hundreds of distinct activities and decisions being taken about what to do next. The...
