This week developers at Seneca College have been working hard to add more features and functionalities to Starchart. With the release of version 0.2, I got to experiment with MailHog; tool developers used to test sending and receiving emails in a development environment using a fake SMTP server. Another cool thing is you don't need an actual recipient or sender account to use Mailhog. I like Mailhog because you do not have to install it locally. Pulling the Mailhog docker image and building the container will give the developer access to a friendly UI similar to that of Google or Outlook.

The Fun Part

The exciting part was sending test emails using the sendNotifications I contributed to and having them appear in real-time in the Mailhog UI.

The Tough Part

The challenging part was writing unit tests for Nodemailer using Vitest/Jest API. Fetching messages sent to the recipient using the endpoint returns a deeply nested object. I had to end up using to expect functions such as arrayContaining and objectContaining in conjunction to ignore fields that were not relevant to the test suite.

Up Next

This week I intend on implementing functionality for sending email notifications when a domain becomes active or errors using BullMQ workers queues. Also, working with BullMQ may prove challenging, but I want to give it a shot, as I would gain valuable experience. Another goal is to update the Dependabot configuration to avoid non-LTS node version updates. Also, since I am one of the Sheriffs this week, I intend to be highly available if any problems require prompt attention.