There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. – Phil Karlton

Let’s talk about variable name antipatterns!

There’s almost always a better variable name or value than ‘foo’. It’s useful as a debugging placeholder, but it almost never belongs in production code, even and especially in automated tests.

Names in software are hard. But what’s worse than a bad name? Sticking with it because you can’t change it. I want us all to be able to effortlessly and fearlessly fix bad names, and that’s the topic of this post.

A common, problematic convention I see in Ruby tests are variable names like this:

user_a = create(:user, last_log_in: today)
user_b = create(:user, last_log_in: last_year)