π₯§ Pie mail - hallowe'en edition
Hi Reader, and welcome to another edition of pie mail!
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I hope you're well! If you're the kind of person that does hallowe'eney things, I hope it was a good one! It's not really a big thing here in Auckland. Occasionally we get trick-or-treaters though, so I try to have some candy on hand.
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But, no trick-or-treaters turned up. So, I have to eat this whole bag of fun-size Snickers by myself. Tough times. π
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Why not treat yourself to some candy right now? Or, consume some sweet email content instead! Here ya go!
β¨ Some interesting links β¨
Rico's cheatsheets
I love cheat sheets! In one of my first jobs, someone gave me a vim cheat sheet, and it helped me more times than I can remember. Since then, I keep an eye out for good cheat sheets to keep at hand. Rico Sta. Cruz has compiled a huge selection of cheat sheets (yes, including one for vim). There's bound to be one for something you're using, so take a look - a powerful and handy item to have on hand!
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Ali Haydar on Lessons Learned about Software Quality
My friend Ali published an article summarising some of his thoughts on quality. I really like how he's pulled in and woven together a lot of different threads on quality from different sources. It's a longer read, so make a cup of tea, sit back and read at your leisure!
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Names and identities change
I really like this article on designing for changing names and identities, by Mattie Behrens. We live in a world where names and identities can change, and are very important to people! Software we build needs to be inclusive of this factor, and reading this has been a powerful reminder for me.
π This week I learned... π
β¦the value of testing for outages from your third party providers!
Itβs pretty common for companies to rely on a third party provider for something these days.
It might be something really vital to your service, like a payment provider. Or something less important, but still valuable, like a metrics or analytics service.
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This week, one of our third party providers had an outage. I won't say which one. π
It didnβt affect our service, because we'd planned ahead for a situation like this. But it did make me think about how we test for something that we are reliant on, but don't have any control over?
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When testing, what questions do you ask when setting up new third party integrations?
Here are some that I came up with as a starting point:
- how does our product behave when this service is unavailable?
- how do we know this service has gone down? (do they alert us somehow? Slack integration? Pagerduty alert?)
- do we need to tell our customers when this service goes down?
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I hope thatβs helpful for someone - itβs definitely been helpful for me to think about!
Do you have any good questions you could add to this list? Let me know!
𧩠Puzzle time π§©
One of my favourite features in Slack is the ability to add custom emoji.
They have a screen like this, that shows all the custom emoji you've got, and who added them:
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I wanted to know who in our company added the most emoji. So, I used my JavaScript skills* to create a Chrome extension that would work it out.
Slack stores emoji information as JSON objects, like this**:
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Using the Slack API, I can retrieve an array that contains every emoji, in this format. Then I just looped through the array, and counted up how many emoji each person has created. Something like this:
(array.findIndex() returns '-1' if it doesn't find a result)
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Aside from performance issues, there's at least one bug here. Can you see what it is?
Reply and let me know!
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Hint (highlight text to see): Slack doesn't use 'user_display_name' as a unique identifier for a person - for a good reason!
*OK, I don't have much in the way of JavaScript skills, but I get by!β
β**Before you ask, I obfuscated all this data - none of it's real
πͺ Events coming up πͺ
TestBash NZ - November 20
I'm lucky enough to be MCing for TestBash NZ again this year. I know I already mentioned it in a previous email, but, well I'm excited for it! For me, it's the highlight of the testing calendar.
The world being what it is right now, it's all online, and there are some great talks lined up from Butch Mayhew, Janet Gregory, Ali Khalid, Kateryna Nesmyelova, Helen Liu and Manoj Kumar. Don't miss it, register now!β
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Testflix - November 28
I'm also pleased to be one of the speakers for TestFlix, the "Global Software Testing Binge", a new online conference this year. It seems like a neat idea, a large number of short talks - there should be something to suit everyone!
There's some of industry's best speakers and bloggers sharing, and it's free, so check it out!β
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π Thanks for reading! π
Thanks all! I hope you have a great couple of weeks as we speed towards the end of 2020.
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As always, any feedback is appreciated, and I love hearing your stories and comments, so please let me know. You can reply to this email, or hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter.
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Cheers,
James a.k.a. JPie π₯§
βhttps://jpie.nzβ
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Hi, Iβm a creator
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