Screenshots and Artifacts
Screenshots can be a useful tool in debugging broken scripts as they will show you when a spinner is stuck spinning or a bit of ‘3rd party crap’ isn’t downloading properly. Both Py.Saunter and...
View ArticlePage Object Contest #1: TimelineJS
Every two weeks I’ll be coming up with a dastardly bit of web automation and running a contest to see how others solve the problem. The chosen task will not be around what I am automating for work...
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So you want to build a framework…
My first foray into the ‘framework’ business was likely 1999 at one of the big Canadian banks. We were automating binders, literally 3″ ring binders, of manual test cases into WinRunner. There were 5...
View ArticleCooking With Web Automation – JQuery UI Menus
So I am officially sick and tired of seeing webinars on ‘locators’ and ‘[basic] synchronization’ and ‘page objects’. There is enough good content out there for all those topics … and a sea of horrid,...
View ArticleGoing Dependent
Earlier in the year I took my idea for a ‘mindmap based test idea management app’ all the way to the finals of Ignite Durham. And while I didn’t win, one of the judges was the founder and CEO of a...
View ArticleSaunterPHP and the Browsermob Proxy
At this point, running all your scripts through a proxy should just be an accepted good practice. And if not, go watch Proxy & Executor. Back? Excellent. Now let’s get your scripts going through...
View ArticleContinuous Delivery in a .NET World
Here is one the other talk I did at Øredev this year. The original pitch was going to be show a single character commit and walk it through to production. Which is in itself a pretty bold idea for 40...
View ArticleLessons learned from 19 months of a delivery manager
This is one of the talks I did at Øredev last week. As usual, my decks are generally useless without me in front of them. But lucky(?) for you, all the sessions were recorded. CONFESSIONS OF A ROOKIE...
View ArticleStop Being A Language Snob: Debunking The ‘But Our Application Is Written In...
The folks over at Sauce Labs just published a guest post on their blog I wrong on Stop Being A Language Snob: Debunking The ‘But Our Application Is Written In X’ Myth. This doesn’t get debunked nearly...
View ArticleSaunter 2.0
Welp. After 2+ years of tinkering and appearing to be an absentee open source landlord, I just pushed Saunter 2.0.0 up to PyPI. When I list the things that have changed, it is rather silly to have...
View ArticleUsing Puppet to manage AWS agents (on Ubuntu)
One of the first thing any cloud-ification and/or devops-ification project needs to do is figure out how they are going to manage their assets. In my case, I use puppet. AWS is starting to do more...
View ArticleFaster feedback by limiting information frequency
Code coverage is one of those wacky metrics that straddles the line between useful and vanity. On one hand, it gives you an idea of how safely you can make changes, but on the other it can be a...
View ArticleIt’s always a Security Group problem…
I’ve got a number number of private subnets within my AWS VPC that are all nice and segregated from each other. But every time I light up a new Ubuntu instance and tell it to ‘apt-get update’ it times...
View ArticleHarmonizing Maintenance Windows
At the moment we are only using RDS and ElastiCache within AWS, but more services we use the more maintenance windows is going to come up. Rather than have them at random places around the week and...
View ArticleHubSpot in an AWS World
We recently moved our corporate website from WPEngine to HubSpot and as part of that, you have to do some DNS trickery. HubSpot helpfully provides instructions for various DNS providers, but not Route...
View ArticleClient-specific domains with CloudFormation for clients that use Google as...
A number of our clients want vanity domains for their experiences, which adds a laywer (or two) of operations overhead beyond just having a line item in the invoice. In the spirit of ‘infrastructure as...
View Articlemobilexco/laravel-scout-elastic; an AWS Elasticsearch driver for Laravel Scout
Wherein our hero forks another Laravel package to make it work with aws iam roles. Stop. Putting. Credentials. In. Your. Repos. Or. Instances. — adam goucher (@adamgoucher) June 30, 2018 A large piece...
View ArticleStructured Logs in Laravel
I’ve been following the likes of Charity Majors on the twitters and one of her big things around Observability is producing logs in a ‘structured’ format. (Loosely defined as ‘something that a machine...
View ArticleStructured Logs in Laravel (Part 2)
The previous post showed you how to tweak Laravel’s default logging setup to output in json which is a key part of creating structured logs. With structured logs you can move yourself towards a more...
View ArticleLaravel and Logstash
As we get larger clients, our need to not be cowboying our monitoring / alerting is increasing. In our scenario we are injesting logs via Logstash and sending them all to an AWS Elasticsearch instance,...
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