Tooling MOC

Date: 2026-08-16

Everything around the code. Tooling is where an individual habit becomes a team guarantee.

Version control

Git Model — commits, trees, refs and the DAG. Understand this once and every git confusion resolves
Branching Strategies — trunk-based, GitHub flow, git flow, and the release cadence each assumes
Merge vs Rebase — two histories, two philosophies, and when each is wrong
Resolving Conflicts — what a conflict actually is, and how to stop causing them
Git Bisect — binary search through history to find the commit that broke it
Rewriting History — interactive rebase, amend, and the rules about shared branches
Commit Hygiene — messages, atomicity, and why it’s for the person doing the bisect in a year
Code Review — what to look for, what to leave, and reviewing for the change rather than the code

Package Managers — npm, pnpm, yarn: resolution, hoisting, and disk layout
Lockfiles — reproducible installs, and why committing them isn’t optional
Semantic Versioning — what the three numbers promise, and how often that promise holds
Dependency Management — update cadence, transitive dependencies, and audit noise
Supply Chain Risk — the attack surface every install adds

Build Tools — what a bundler actually does, and the stages of the pipeline
Vite — dev via native ESM, production via a bundler, and why that split works
Module Bundling — resolution, graphs, chunks and output formats
Transpilation — Babel, SWC, esbuild, and target compatibility
Source Maps — debugging generated code, and the decision about shipping them
Build Caching — local and remote caching, and what makes a build reproducible enough to cache

Testing Strategy — the pyramid, its critics, and deciding what to test rather than how much
Unit Testing — the unit boundary, and why picking it badly makes tests fragile
Integration Testing — testing the seams, which is where the bugs live
End-to-End Testing — Playwright and the real-browser tier
Test Doubles — stubs, mocks, fakes, spies: four things routinely called mocks
Test Data — factories, fixtures, and keeping tests independent
Flaky Tests — the causes, and why tolerating one is how a suite dies
Visual Regression Testing — screenshot diffing, and its false-positive problem
Evaluating Non-Deterministic Systems — testing what won’t answer the same way twice: eval sets, judges, and what “good enough” means as a number
Accessibility Testing — what automated checks catch, and the large share they can’t

Continuous Integration — the practice, not the product: integrating often enough that conflicts stay small
Continuous Deployment — shipping automatically, and the confidence prerequisites
Pipeline Design — stages, parallelism, caching, and keeping it under the attention span
Pre-Commit Hooks — fast local checks, and the ones that belong in CI instead
Preview Environments — a URL per pull request, and how much review it unlocks

Monorepos — one repo, many packages: what it solves and what it costs
Containers — Docker as environment reproducibility, and the local-dev tradeoff
Environment Configuration — env vars, config precedence, and secrets that shouldn’t be in either
Local Development Setup — the onboarding cost nobody measures
Debugging Techniques — breakpoints, bisection, logging discipline, and rubber-ducking as a method
AI Coding Tools — where they help, where they confidently don’t, and reviewing generated code properly

Filed in other domains, needed constantly here.