I Cut My Test Suite Time in Half by Slicing Up a CSV File

I made a confession recently on LinkedIn: I've been running Holiday API for the last decade on spreadsheets. Not one of those fictional accounts that so many people post, I actually did run everything in a spreadsheet. It allowed me to have an admin interface without building one, and the friction was minimal but not zero. For the most part, CSV files are easy enough to parse and extract data from, even when they are massive. Easy to work with isn't the same as fast though. I'm a caching wizard on the live site, but in my test code, I like to skip the cache so tests are run from a cold start. In this scenario, no one test can influence the results of another, as it should be. My test suite was already plenty fast, clocking in just north of 10 minutes. Years ago it was taking 15+ minutes so I did some performance tuning and always felt like it was in a sufficient place. Keep in mind we're talking about over 1.2 million tests, mostly related to data regression. Part of my recent…

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