Wednesday, October 18, 2023

Beyond TDD

 Today I was writing a class JUnit test code that of course runs very slow as it starts up by bringing the whole AWS infrastructure online (exaggeration) just to run several assertTrue statements..

As you might suspect, I am not fond of writing this test code. This is because I know in my heart that this test code will be more burden than useful:

  1. The test will contribute to a test suite that will take 5 hours to complete
  2. The test is very hard to read because it deals with CSV importing code.. and Java does not deal well with such string intensive inputs
  3. The test has a lot of test specific code which adds maintenance burden
  4. Dev only test code, modern test code strive towards making it readable for non-technical

This frustration brought me an idea. A vision of testing Beyond TTD. What if tests live inside the application and can be used run time? The main motivation for this is to really have a living test suite and documentation. This makes it so that non-technical users can add and maintain test cases themselves with normal user-interface.

It has pros and cons of course, but it feels to me that this is the right balance. You will of course needs to really design this and probably favor pure functions to aid in test simplicity..

PS: The title is inspired by Nico Rosberg's podcast called "Beyond Victory"

Thursday, September 21, 2023

TIL: The JVM can ommit stacktraces in the name of optimization

While investigating an issue, I saw a NullPointerException without a stacktrace..

ERROR logs that omits the throwable object (and it is available) is quite devastating. I call such situation 'swallowing the exception'.

However, this time, it is very different. Apparently the HotSpot JVM may opt to not log the stacktrace but  only the exception:


source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2411487/nullpointerexception-in-java-with-no-stacktrace

Having a look at older instances of this ERROR log, I found that the occurrence the day before indeed had stacktrace. This is quite surprising and something I would not expect..

Monday, August 19, 2019

Software Methodologies and Religion

I have recently read an interesting 2006 post from Steve Yegge titled Good Agile, Bad Agile. The comments section has also informative criticisms.

It's good to read and understand various ideas. From my experience and knowledge so far, I think the biggest problem with methodologies is that company X can be so different and it is very easy to blindly 'adopt' a methodology without putting in the effort in understanding it. The same with religion and superstition. (Idea I got from this article).

The most interesting idea I have learned so far on this topic however comes from Edgar Schein. Paraphrasing the idea: "Professional Relationship hurts Communication". I highly recommend listening to him on YouTube. I look forward to read his books.

Friday, August 12, 2016

TIL (Today I Learned) - various important things for Software Development

  1. When resetting a whole column on a relational database table, dropping/adding the column might be better than running an UPDATE. In my case, I had to update two columns to NULL from a table with 35 million rows.
  2. OAuth 1. I had to support a third party to use our REST service that uses OAuth 1.0a. In only a couple of days, I had to learn how this spec works and write up the details needed by the 3rd party to write a client. I'm glad that today there's plenty of resources for this complicated spec; I can imagine that this would be very troublesome to understand in the past. At least a former colleague had a lot of issues when he worked with Facebook OAuth in the past. This blog post really helped me out in quickly understanding OAuth.
  3. Monitor HTTP traffic of java programs via Fiddler. With networking setups, it is often easier said than done. By experience, I knew I would be in trouble with how to setup the SSL certs, force java to to use a proxy server, etc. Surprisingly, this is actually easy to do. I use this guide and was able to set it up in 5 mins!

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Print Plain SQL Select Statement in Slick 3.0.0


If you were searching the net on how to print the extremely useful plain SQL select statement when using Slick 3.0.0 queries; Then it's your lucky day.

Here's a working example wherein AccountActivityHistory_00Table is my table.

  val q0 = Replica.AccountActivityHistory_00Table.filter(row => (row.DateCreated >= start && row.DateCreated <= end) || (row.DateModified >= start && row.DateModified <= end))
  println(q0.result.statements)


It's in the result field, as in result.statements, this is an Iterable of Strings.

As of this writing the example from Typesafe isn't updated yet to slick 3.0.0 release:
https://github.com/typesafehub/activator-hello-slick/blob/slick-3.0/src/main/scala/HelloSlick.scala

And the upgrade guide doesn't tell us anything either:
http://slick.typesafe.com/doc/3.0.0/upgrade.html

Wednesday, June 4, 2014

Workstation Automation I: Startup Tomboy Notes

I use Tomboy Notes as my paperless way to track my working hours for almost a year now. Everyday, when Ubuntu finishes booting up, the first thing I do is to start two applications: Firefox and Tomboy Notes.

Screenshot of my May 12, 2014 worklog
Once I Tomboy notes starts; my next step is to "Create New Note", then type in the date today as the title of my work log for the rest of the day. And last, put in my time-in.



This only took my around only 10 to 15 seconds of my time everyday. Small amount of time; however, when you add the numbers for a year, it adds up to an 1 hour (262 Working days - ~20 holidays * 15 sec) + the precious cognitive load when you do this + thinking about "why can't I automate this".

Thus I finally decided to automate this and I was able to reduce the time spent to 5 sec + work satisfaction.

Here are the steps I did: By the way, I'm using Ubuntu 11.10
1.  Use "Startup Application Preferences", add in the applications you want to start automatically. In my case, Firefox and Tomboy.


2. Adding firefox is easy. However, for tomboy I need to use xargs to pass in the date today as a parameter. And for this work, I used an sh script.
#!/bin/sh

date "+%B %d, %Y" | xargs -0 tomboy --new-note
3. Learning to use the date command should be easy. xargs however is little more difficult. Fortunately, this page explained it well.

4. Save this script as tomboy.sh, then make sure that it can be executable at boot time:
chmod 777 tomboy.sh
5. Enjoy!

Friday, January 17, 2014

Me doing a talk about Eclipse at Philippine Tech Hackers meetup

Me doing a presentation for phacker's hackmakati, topic "Editors & IDEs". My presentation was for Eclipse.



It's been too long since I did a presentation like this, too long that trees can already talk. Well, specifically 2 years already.

The audience was a mixed, rubyists, groovyists, perlites (or stringmaster, as suggested by a good friend/buddy from ##programming), a few droids & even non-programmers. I hope these folks didn't get bored with me speaking in English. Yep, there were non-tagalog folks so I had to talk in English - something I did not anticipate, because the last time I went to phackers meetup (2 months ago), we were very few & all filipino.

The other talks (vim, eclipse, sublime) were great! their presentation stacks were a lot better than mine :|. At the very least, I got to show this cool image:



Lesson learned: my english & confidence skills (if they were existent) went really bad. On the positive side, it was a great experience, exp that you do not get by everyday. Thank you Philippine Tech Hackers!

Link to my presentation slides.

/* also thanks to my good friend Fuji for lending me his laptop */