DevOps QA: The Many Hats of a Quality Assurance Engineer
Note: This is the second post in a series about the different roles I end up carrying out as a Quality Assurance Engineer. You can check out the first post here, where I talk about wearing my Tester hat!
April 6, 2018
Drupal 8: Consumption of a Third-Party API
For a recent project, we were tasked to consume the client's internal data from a custom API. Now, this scenario was lucky for us, the API provides a total item count of about 5000, but when queried with a start date, it provides all revisions of items between then and now. The premise was that the data was to be downloaded at regular intervals, so that content editors didn't need to copy and past to keep product information up to date.
April 5, 2018
The Many Hats of Quality Assurance Engineers: Tester
Quality Assurance Engineer is a broad term that can cover a wide variety of roles and responsibilities. It can refer to a more specialized role, like Automation Engineer or Technical Support. It might be used to describe someone responsible for DevOps practices, or the person in charge of Scrum Master duties and feature testing.
April 5, 2018
Discovery is Like Onboarding
I recently started working at Metal Toad. Metal Toad has one of the best onboarding processes I have ever experienced — thorough documentation, there are more people happy to help me than I can count, there are well thought-out processes for onboarding, and just about anything that could be done in advance of my arrival had already been done. Nevertheless, I am drinking from a fire hose in an attempt to answer the following (partial) list of questions:
How does the company function?
March 15, 2018
Programmatically Importing Drupal 8 Field Configurations
Sometimes during development, a chicken and egg situation happens when business logic intersects with Drupal's mechanisms. For instance, a custom module, client_business_logic, is built to handle some unique, abstract bit of logic which depends on a taxonomy vocabulary that has fields added to it.
March 13, 2018
Android P and Wi-Fi RTT
Recently, Google launched the first developer preview build of Android™ P. With this, several new features were announced, including two that caught my attention. Those being Neural Networks 1.1 and Wi-Fi RTT. Wi-Fi RTT peaked my initial interest because it was something completely new in Android P.
March 9, 2018
From Senior Engineer to Mature Engineer
When I was fresh out of college with a Computer Science degree, I had a culture-fueled fantasy of what it was to grow into a senior software engineer. Like the mythical 10x programmers, I dreamed of having full workings of a computer at my fingertips and able to hack like the best of them.
February 23, 2018
The Marriage Retrospective
In popular culture and societal norms there is little space within romantic relationships to air your grievances about your partner. Or, if you do have a “safe” space to share things with your partner about the relationship — that you need couples counseling or a referee. But I’d argue that Agile methodology — that most versatile framework for product development — can even help when it comes to marital happiness.
February 21, 2018
The Four Budget Domains of Enterprise IoT Projects
IoT is rapidly transforming manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and several other industries. The ability to predict asset failure, rapidly diagnosis bottlenecks, and invent new revenue streams are elevating industry standards at a pace that is difficult to keep up with. Executives in these industries have been asking me to give them the basics of what they need to do.
January 28, 2018
Mean Time Between Loss of Sleep
“MTBLS”: I first encountered this phrase on a New Relic blog. It's a half-joking reference to a concept used by reliability engineers, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). I was intrigued though, and thought it would be an interesting metric to track.
We have high-resolution data about our machines' health – down to the smallest minutia – but precious little about the health of our people.
January 26, 2018