Test & Code

Latest Episodes:

218: Balancing test coverage with test costs - Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya Apr 17, 2024

Show notes

Nicole is a software engineer and writer, and recently wrote about the trade-offs we make when deciding which tests to write and how much testing is enough.

We talk about:

Balancing schedule vs testing
How much testing is the right about of testing
Should code coverage be measured and tracked
Good refactoring can reduce code coverage
Is it worth testing error conditions?
Are rare error codes ok to just monitor?
API drift and autospec
Mitigating risk
Deciding what to test and what not to test
Focus testing on key money-making features
If there's a bug in this part of the code, how much business impact is there?
Performance testing needs to approximately match real world workloads
Cost of a service breaking vs the cost of creating, maintaining, and running tests
Keeping test suites quick to minimize getting distracted

Links:

Too much of a good thing: the trade-off we make with tests
Load testing is hard, and the tools are... not great. But why?
Yet Another Rust Resource (YARR!)
Goodhart's law - "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"

217: Podcasting / SaaS / Work Life Balance - Justin Jackson Apr 11, 2024

Show notes

If you've ever thought about starting a podcast or a SaaS project, you'll want to listen to this episode.
Justin is one of the people who motivated me to get started podcasting.
He's also running a successful SaaS company, transistor.fm, which hosts this podcast.

Topics:

Podcasting
Building new SaaS (software as a service) products
Balancing work, side hustle, and family
Great places to snowboard in British Columbia

BTW.

Links from the show:

Transistor.fm - excellent podcast hosting, Justin is a co-founder
How to start a podcast in 2024
Podcasts from Justin
- Build your SaaS - current
- Build & Launch - an older one, but great
- MegaMaker - from 2021 / 2022

216: ruff, uv, and Astral: Python tooling, much faster, with Rust Mar 11, 2024

Show notes

Charlie Marsh and team are using Rust to make Python tooling faster.

Ruff can take the place of Flake8, isort, and Black, and so much more.
uv can take the place of pip, pip-tools, and virtualenv
Astral is Charlie's venture backed company, and what they have with `ruff` and `uv` is just the start.

Since uv is the newest tool, there's quite a bit of the discussion diving into uv.

Links:

215: Staying Technical as a Manager Feb 25, 2024

Show notes

Software engineers that move into leadership roles have a struggle between learning leadership skills, maintaining technical skills, and learning new leadership and technical skills.
Matt Makai went from individual contributor to developer relations to leadership in devrel.
We discuss how to stay technical, as well as dive into some results of his studies in how companies use developer relationship channels.

214: Python Testing in VS Code Feb 06, 2024

Show notes

If you haven't tried running automated tests, especially with pytest, in VS Code recently, you should take another look.
The Python for VS Code interface for testing, especially for pytest, has changed recently.
On this episode we discuss the change with the software engineer working on the pytest changes, Eleanor Boyd, and the product manager, Courtney Webster.

Links from the episode:

213: Repeating Tests Jan 19, 2024

Show notes

If a test fails in a test suite, I'm going to want to re-run the test. I may even want to re-run a test, or a subset of the suite, a bunch of times.
There are a few pytest plugins that help with this:

We talk about each of these in this episode.

212: Canon TDD - by Kent Beck Jan 13, 2024

Show notes

In 2002, Kent Beck released a book called "Test Driven Development by Example".
In December of 2023, Kent wrote an article called "Canon TDD".
With Kent's permission, this episode contains the full content of the article.

Brian's commentary is saved for a followup episode.

Links:

211: Stamp out test dependencies with pytest plugins Dec 15, 2023

Show notes

We want to be able to run tests in a suite, and debug them in isolation, and have the behavior be the same.
If the behavior is different in isolation vs in a suite, it's a nightmare to debug.

In this episode, we'll talk about: