bradleyjoyce [dot] com

So today I launched Grade The President. It’s a simple site that allows you to tell the world what you think about President Barack Obama with a simple grade, A through F. I’ve had the domain gradethepresident.com (along with gradecongress.com and govgrader.com) sitting around for a while. I decided GTP would be a fun project to force myself to practice test and behavior driven development on. Ever since I’ve started working on larger projects, I’ve really come to see the value of TDD/BDD, requiring that the my team utilize it on all our client projects. However, I had never really done much of it myself in practice. What I found is that it is extremely hard to remained disciplined with writing the tests first, then implementing the feature… especially when it comes to working with external services. The amount of time I needed to write the tests ending up being 2-3x of what it took to actually code features. I’m a believer, I see the value, I wish ALL my projects had great test coverage… but testing can sometimes really, really slow you down. So anyway, there you have it. Go check out Grade The President and cast your grade!