Here’s my random collection of thoughts on the subject.
I have no idea how common it is in general. Seems like some devs build tests while others don’t. This varies plenty on a team level as well as organization wide. I’ve observed this at small to very large companies, though not FAANG where I generally hope and expect that tests are a stronger standard.
I will say that test are consistently and heavily used in every large, open source project that I’ve reviewed. At some point, I think quality test cases become a requirement.
Here’s the big thing. Building automated tests is almost always a wise investment, regardless of the size of the org. Manual testing is dramatically more expensive and less effective than running unit and integration tests. I’ve never written unit tests and not found issues.
More importantly, writing unit tests forces you to write code that can be tested. This is important. IMO, code that can be tested is 1) structured differently and 2) almost always better.
Unit tests protect you from your own mistakes. Frequently. Integration tests protect you from other people. E.g when your code depends on an api and that api unexpectedly introduces a breaking change.
Everybody likes having quality tests. Nobody likes writing tests.
Quality tests are basically a strict requirement for fully automating ci/cd to production. Sure, you can skip tests and automate prior deploys, but I certainly don’t recommend it. I would expect people to be fired for doing this.
Chasing 100% test coverage is a fools game. Think about your code, what matters, and what doesn’t. Test the parts that add value and skip the rest. This is highly related to how writing unit tests change your code.
Building front end tests is inherently hard. It’s practically impossible to fully test front end code. Not even close.
Personally, I like the idea of skipping tests when you’re building a POC. Before the POC is done, you may not know if your solution is viable or what needs to be tested. The POC helps you understand. Builds tests for MVP and further iterations.
Quality ci/cd tests are complimented by quality observability, which is a large and independent topic.
Test coverage is useful to measure simply because it’s a metric. You can set standards. You can codify the number into ci/cd. You can observe if the number goes up or down over time. You can argue if these things are valuable but quantifying test coverage just makes it simpler or possible to discuss testing. As people discuss test coverage and building tests becomes normalized, the topic becomes boring. You’ll only get thoughtful discussions on automated testing when somebody establishes a new method, pattern, etc. After that, most tests are very simple. That’s often the point.
Even “testing on autopilot” has high value.
You can build lots of useful front end tests. There are tools for it. But it’s just not possible to test everything because you can’t codify every requirement. E.g. ensure that this ui element is 5 pixels below some other element, except when the window shrinks, and …
I haven’t seen great front end tests. But the ones I’ve seen mostly focus on functionality and flow rather than aiming to cover all possible scenarios. Unit tests are different in this regard.
Integration testing makes sense but I find it hard to do in the time I have.
This is a red flag. Building tests should be a planned part of your work, usually described as acceptance criteria. If you need 4 hours to write a code change, then plan for 8 or whatever so you can build tests. Engineering leaders should encourage this. If they don’t, I would consider that a cultural problem. One that indicates a lack of focus on quality and all of the problems that follow.
Edit: I want to soften my “red flag” comment. That’s a red flag for me. That job isn’t necessary bad. But I would personally not be interested. It’s ok to accept things like, “we don’t write tests and sometimes we deal with issues”. Especially if it’s a good job otherwise.
Personally, I abandoned chromium last year when Google forced the web drm nonsense into the code base. It was a grand example of the problem. Sure, they backed out the change a few months later. But the damage was done and I already migrated to Firefox. It’s been great.
As states ban abortions, a 1968 federal law requires hospitals that receive Medicare dollars to stabilize patients in a medical emergency, creating a catch-22 for care providers...
While I sympathize with the frustration, anger, etc. over these dystopian laws, we shouldn’t direct those emotions at the doctors. It’s quite easy to say that they’re ethically responsible and should break the law to do what’s right. It’s dramatically more difficult to be in that situation and accept enormous personal liability for your ethics. The doctors are victims too, obviously to a lesser degree.
Doctors willingly breaking the law to do what is ethically correct. Unfortunately, they would be risking much more than their jobs. They would be risking every major aspect of their lives. Their jobs, yes. Their income and lifestyle. A massive amount of media attention. Legal problems for months or longer. Incarceration. Basically everything. It’s very difficult to look at any single person and correctly say “this is your responsibility”. Self sacrifice just isn’t reasonable or ethical.
A doctor in jail and without a medical license will not be helping anyone with medical care.
Unfortunately, I think you find that extremely few people are willing to accept those risks. And if you could suddenly prevent them from practicing medicine because they follow the law, I think you will find that Idaho suddenly has no doctors at all.
Proton is obviously promoting their own product: proton pass. I tried it and found that it needs a little more development time. Just a little polishing.
In the meantime, Bitwarden is fantastic. I also hear good things about onepass. Don’t use chrome’s password manager.
Over the past year or so I’ve been playing with the idea of a decentralised social platform based on your location. By putting physical location at the centre of the experience, such a platform could be used to bring communities together and provide a source of local information when travelling. Please let me know what you...
I spent several weeks thinking about this exact idea.
Federation is cool. You could set up each instance to only federate with instances for nearby towns and cities. Maybe a “2 district” radius. Users would only see content for their local communities. Local news stays local. Local government could officially participate if they wish. People you talk to are actually neighbors you might see in person. Larger regions like counties, states, provinces, or even countries, could also have dedicated instances and federate similarly. I think this is the big appeal and it sounds awesome!
There are a few problems 🙂
First is a little bit of confusion with posting. Let’s say that I see a post about a cool new restaurant in my town. I share it with a friend who lives a few towns away and that’s outside the “federation radius”. I can’t share the post with that friend very easily. Maybe the tools could be enhanced to make this viable?
Second is a matter of privacy. How do you know that new accounts belong to people associated with the geographic location of each instance? If you don’t validate, the system will certainly be abused. If you do validate, then users need to supply some real info! Home address, ID, etc. that’s a big deal for users and instance admins.
Third. What happens if you move? Do you have to abandon your old account and start over? Again, the system itself can be developed further to solve this. But that’ll take time and money.
Next is the operating costs. You would need to build thousands of instances to build this system up. And each one would have to be tied to a geographic region. You need new features to handle signups this way. You have the simple cost of running these servers. You probably need a lot of staff to manage it all. This is an expensive platform for one party to run. Alternatively…
It doesn’t have to be one party running this entire system. That’s the point of the Fediverse, right? The operational costs go way down if anyone can run their own instance. But how do you enforce the rules of federating with instances for geographically nearby locations? I don’t see a reasonable way to solve this one.
I could probably keep listing issues. But these are the big ones IMO. If you solve these, the system is viable and could be amazing.
After reading your responses, it seems like we’re describing two different methods of building this system.
Your ideas seems to depend on having many instances for various regions, where all instances are federated with each other. So my local instance somewhere in the US would still be federated with for example, an instance in Germany. But the content I receive would be heavily focused on “nearby” content. Interesting
My ideas are based on an important difference. An instance for my town would only federate with instances for the surrounding towns. Maybe one or two more “hops” away. So sharing content between my local instance and one in Germany would be impossible. Content on my local instance would only be accessible to users in nearby instances. Local content enforced by local federation.
I’m generally not a big fan of big social media like e.g. Facebook where you might have many thousands of followers, purposefully grow the numbers, etc. I personally think these things are an everyday evil. Yes, it’s a bit melodramatic 🙂but that’s how I feel. Reddit, and now Lemmy are about as far as I like to go with it.
So the isolation of geo-local-only federation is a feature. The feature, actually. I want an entire social media platform that isn’t capable of focusing on single accounts. Where you are near guaranteed to interact with your local community only. Where it would take a dramatic effort for a single actor to influence global opinions. I want a social media platform that isn’t so easy to manipulate. I could go on and on.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember the source so we may need to go digging. But I recall reading that something like 1/3 of all bugs are related to memory safety. And those bugs translate to things like buffer overflow and privilege escalation attacks.
The proclaimed advantage is that by making the entirety of Rust memory safe, that entire class of bugs simply won’t exist for projects written in Rust. When they do happen, the bugs will be addressed by the language rather than many thousands of downstream projects. It should be an enormous gain in development performance for the world.
I think the idea makes sense. Time will tell us how well that works.
I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite....
Strange. I’m not exactly keeping track. But isn’t the current going in just the opposite direction? Seems like tons of utilities are being rewritten in Rust to avoid memory safety bugs
Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals – essentially traditional hospitals with emergency departments – and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transmitted user data to third parties....
At first, I found this funny. Then I realized how scary, sad, etc. the reality is.
Companies typically prefer users to use a native app for two reasons. First, the software is sometimes easier to build. Second, they are capable of scraping a vastly larger and more valuable set of data from the user.
Browsers can hit many differs sites, many of which are dangerous. Thus, web browsers have to be as secure as possible to protect users from malicious sites. This includes Facebook, TikTok, every medical site you’ve ever logged into, etc.
I know a lot about software. Personally, I view every installed app as a means of attacking my privacy. If you have the choice and your experience isn’t diminished, use a web browser instead of a native app.
Go down to App Privacy and View Details. It’s absolutely terrible how much data they collect. Unethical at a minimum. Now compare to Voyager for Lemmy: apps.apple.com/us/app/…/id6451429762
I ditched chrome (chromium + google propriety spyware) some years ago in favor of Brave browser (chromium + Brave stuff). It was a decent user experience but Brave also does some shady stuff, which you can google easily if interested.
Last year, google poisoned chromium with DRM stuff. They rolled back the changes after a few months but the damage was already done. I, and many others, jumped ship to Firefox and other non-chromium based browsers. Firefox isn’t perfect, but it’s an excellent browser. I’m sticking with it for the foreseeable future. And absolutely use uBlock Origin. Between that and proton VPN features, I don’t see ads anymore. It’s fantastic.
I had an issue recently with getting FileBrowser to run and while researching that, I found this tool which creates a docker-compose.yml file from a docker run command. It worked well for me, so I am passing it along to you all. I hope someone else finds this helpful....
I recently discovered k3d. It’s a light wrapper around k3s, which is kubernetes on docker. It’s amazingly easy to use! If you have docker installed, you can learn the commands and create a k8s cluster in under 5 minutes.
For anyone like me that likes k8s, k3d is a fantastic alternative to docker compose!
Thanks for the links. I read the article on my phone using reader mode. Apparently it was hiding some of the embedded links. Which is annoying because I really like reader mode 🙂
I just skimmed through the article about misuse of tax funds. It’s a big improvement on providing detailed information. Some of it sure seems shady without digging. Music videos promoting herself that are funded by taxes? Yikes!
But I’m still a bit annoyed or something that they don’t explain what the Las Vegas trip was for. Honestly, a few thousand dollars for a business trip could be pretty normal IMO. It really depends on the details. Was she gambling, drinking, etc with tax money? Or did she fly in, spend a few nights, and work the whole time?
Anyways, thanks again for giving me a little more context
Is there a "markup language" to describe a debugging session?
I want to document my debugging sessions in a text file but I don’t know if anyone did this before....
Can you hear this video? MP4 embed in comment autoplays, but muted - no option to save/enlarge/unmute/open URL in browser (sh.itjust.works)
The above comment embeds this link:...
Looking for Scriptable asynchronous communication tools
Anyone know of any scriptable asynchronous communication tools?...
Possibly stupid question: is automated testing actually a common practice?
Referring more to smaller places like my own - few hundred employees with ~20 person IT team (~10 developers)....
Monthly Release Notes - April 2024 (version 1.89) (code.visualstudio.com)
Preview Markdown images & videos - Hover over a link to preview images & videos in Markdown....
The categorical hate towards Chromium and non Google Chromium Browsers is absolute nonsense.
Before you downvote check the community and maybe read my argument....
Capcom is delisting three games on Steam next month (www.videogameschronicle.com)
Dark Void, Dark Void Zero, and Flock! are to be delisted apparently.
Can an online library of classic video games ever be legal? (arstechnica.com)
‘How sick do they have to get?’ Doctors brace for US supreme court hearing on emergency abortions (www.theguardian.com)
As states ban abortions, a 1968 federal law requires hospitals that receive Medicare dollars to stabilize patients in a medical emergency, creating a catch-22 for care providers...
Forgejo v7.0 is now available (forgejo.org)
Is your Chrome password manager actually secure? (proton.me)
Could We Build a Decentralised Social Platform Rooted in Place? (carlnewton.github.io)
Over the past year or so I’ve been playing with the idea of a decentralised social platform based on your location. By putting physical location at the centre of the experience, such a platform could be used to bring communities together and provide a source of local information when travelling. Please let me know what you...
vaporise - an alternative to the common `rm`...written in Rust... (github.com)
“Anything that can be written in Rust will eventually be written in Rust”
Are there any things in Linux that need to be started over from scratch?
I’m curious how software can be created and evolve over time. I’m afraid that at some point, we’ll realize there are issues with the software we’re using that can only be remedied by massive changes or a complete rewrite....
96% of US Hospital Websites Share Visitor Data with Google, Meta, Data Brokers, and Other Third Parties, Study Finds (www.theregister.com)
Academics at the University of Pennsylvania analyzed a nationally representative sample of 100 non-federal acute care hospitals – essentially traditional hospitals with emergency departments – and their findings were that 96 percent of their websites transmitted user data to third parties....
Composerize - online tool converts docker commands to compose yml (www.composerize.com)
I had an issue recently with getting FileBrowser to run and while researching that, I found this tool which creates a docker-compose.yml file from a docker run command. It worked well for me, so I am passing it along to you all. I hope someone else finds this helpful....
Monthly Release Notes - March 2024 (version 1.88) (code.visualstudio.com)
Apply custom editor labels - Distinguish between editors with same file names....
WATCH: Chaos erupts at town hall meeting as citizens bang on doors, condemn 'worst mayor in America' (www.foxnews.com)