Month: June 2016

My old golf shoes have been falling apart for some time now. There's even a huge open gash on the side of the left shoe which was splitting wider each day.

If it rains my foot will get soaked completely, maybe even wrecking a great round with only a couple holes to go because of sopping wet socks and squeaking shoe, causing me to lose an important tournament.

Don't want that to happen now, do we? So it's high time that I hopped into my car, went to the local golf store and purchased some new shoes. These days you can easily fall victim to greediness and spend an arm and a leg on stupid golf shoes, but I was set on not spending too much money.

But there was a slight dilemma when I went to the store and looked around. I narrowed down the choice to two styles (both Footjoy of course), but I could not decide between them. You had the much less expensive, nicer looking pair but less comfortable. And you had the more expensive but super comfortable pair which fit me perfectly and made me feel like a pro.

Given the two possibilities, which one would you choose?

Answer: Okay so I succumbed to extreme greediness and decided that I preferred feeling like a pro even if it meant forking out an additional forty four euros.

Kevin and me at the golf course.

Fifteen years later and our paths cross again, hard to believe that it's been that long ago since we saw each other last. Fine to know that we remain close friends and can get together so well despite the gaps in time and location.

Today I received an interesting email from someone trying to sell an online tutorial on WebdriverIO which posed the following:

"Quick question: What holds you back from writing automated tests?"

Based on my personal experience doing various projects in the wonderful world of software development, here is a list of reasons with which I replied:

• The product is already finished and in production so there's no more budget left for automated testing.
• The platform is legacy software and no one understands how it works.
• We already have an army of functional testers in India who are manually testing everything, and it's cheap.
• You need "technical" people to setup the the automated test environment, and the only technical people we have are developers and system admins.
• Developers hate to write tests and have no time to learn it.
• Most testers are high-level black-box functional testers and are not concerned with the internal details nor are technical enough to understand the underlying software.
• Setting up an automated environment is expensive.
• There are already tons of tests failing and no one gives a damn.
• The CI runs from Jenkins and the guy that set things up is no longer working for us (don't fix whats not broken).
• Managers do not fully understand what automated testing is and how it really works and are therefore unwilling to invest money.
• Automated testing means that the functionality of the complete product is known, however mostly it is undocumented or specific areas of expertise limited to certain privileged individuals.
• We're too busy and have no time.
• Good testers are hard to find, especially those that are technically inclined and/or understand how to write software.
• The product is not stable and is changing too frequently, meaning that time spent invested in writing test scripts that will continuously break is not worth it.

Been fifteen whole years ago since I last met up with my old university buddy, and lo and behold he will be visiting me this weekend for a fun and relaxing bout of reminiscing about the good old days.

Fifteen years is a long time and there will be much catching up to do I'm sure. We have become older and taken separate paths in life but the bond of friendship keeps us together.

Paths cross here and there.

Signed up for the Learn Elixir and Learn Phoenix online video training.

Been procrastinating long enough so it's time to make the move and learn even more new stuff.

Where was this picture taken?

Ever just wanted to shuffle your Ember model contents around in a random way? Well, here's something I happened to discover while perusing through the Liquid-fire github. This is such a real jewel, so elegant and simple that I had to share it.

shuffle: function() {
  this.get('model').forEach((item) => {
    item._random = Math.random();
  });
  this.set('model', this.get('model').sortBy('_random'));
}