What are some ways we can use GenAI to make developers' lives easier? A couple of years ago I had the chance to use GenAI to help build out a natural-language-to-query-language translator in a software observability system. This capability allowed users to ask a plain-English question such as "What are my slowest …

Read More

Maestro is a great library for writing high-level UI tests that verify your Android app works from your users' perspective. For a more detailed intro into Maestro, please see my recent Maestro intro post. If you're testing an app that makes REST API calls, you'll need a way to verify those parts of the app work …

Read More

For fun I've recently been building an Android app with Kotlin and Compose. With this app, I can set goals for the week and track my progress towards those goals. My schedule is too varied day-to-day to successfully finish daily goals of say, read X minutes a day. But I found that setting goals per week helped me …

Read More

If you're writing unit tests for your React components these days, there's a good chance you're using React Testing Library. It supports user-focused testing with reliable selectors to find elements, such as the data-testid attribute or finding an element by role. Specific and reliable selectors are key to make sure …

Read More

Code coverage - how many code lines and branches are accessed during a test - is easy to measure in many languages and test frameworks. And at first glance, measuring code coverage seems like a no-brainer. After all, who wouldn't want to make sure their code is sufficiently tested? But just because a metric is easy to …

Read More

The OpenTelemetry Java instrumentation agent automatically instruments many common frameworks but there are times you may want to customize your application's telemetry by adding your own custom spans, adding attributes to existing spans, etc. In that case, it can be helpful to verify the custom instrumentation through …

Read More

Recently I was working on sorting rows in a table in React and I wanted to be able to verify the rows sorted into the correct order. The table shows flaky tests (that is, tests that intermittently fail) and is built with Material Table. Material Table conveniently supports sorting out of the box by clicking on the …

Read More

After I added the ability to collect and store code coverage stats in the Projektor test reporting tool, I wanted to also add a graph that showed the trend of code coverage over time. Then users could track their repo's code coverage to see if was increasing, decreasing, or staying the same. The Projektor UI is built …

Read More