Posts
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Getting started with automated quality assurance
The bad news is that every discussion we’ve had about tabs vs spaces was a waste of time, and neither of us learned anything useful. The good news is that we won’t need to have that discussion ever again - there are tools which apply idiomatic indentation for pretty much any language under the sun. But the good news don’t stop there. That discussion about whether entries in a long lists should all be on a single line, broken into long lines, or broken into one item per line? There’s a tool for that. Newline at end of file? There’s a tool for that. How imports should be sorted and grouped? Detecting overly general catch statements, unused variables, or bad spelling? You guessed it. In this article I’ll go through why you might want to automate QA, and some practicalities of how to adopt automated QA tools, so that the team can concentrate on the actually important work.
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Automating ticket progression
I forget to move tickets around the board when I’m supposed to. After working with 10+ ticketing systems for some 20 years, it’s still too alien to have to perform a manual step in a completely separate system at the same time as trying to concentrate on the development. So why not automate this process a bit?
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TLS certificate setup on NixOS
Info dump on how to set up a HTTPS-enabled service on NixOS.
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The lost taglines
Software documentation usually does not include the most important facts you want to know as a beginner. The kind of stuff you might internalise after using something for years, but you could not have learned by reading the documentation. The stuff which should show up as a blinking orange & teal banner on top of the documentation page — the lost taglines:
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Nightly Rust development with Nix
This one took a while to get simple enough; enjoy!
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Git bisect run techniques
git bisect runlets us find the breaking commit in O(log(N)) time for N commits, by doing a binary search through commits to determine the one which broke things. It is extremely useful, but the thing which often takes a long time is figuring out which command to use to reliably determine whether a commit is good or bad. This article explains some techniques to help with this task. -
Interactive NixOS tests
A quick guide to running NixOS tests interactively like you would in other testing framework.
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Using Linux desktop automation for image download
Intelerad has developed something called “nuage Patient Portal”, which is used by many clinics to let patients download their scans. It’s an excellent service, especially if you want to have backups of all of your own health records. But it (or at least the version used by my clinic) does have a flaw: it’s cumbersome to download all the images.
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How to test Renovate configuration changes in GitLab CI
You’ve changed
renovate.json, but of course you want to test the change before merging. There doesn’t seem to be a simple guide to this, so here’s what I’ve cobbled together. -
Nix shell locale support
If you need to do anything to do with locales in a Nix shell, you’ll want to add the following to your environment: