June 22, 2022

Ableye: How I visualized an Ably SDK with Go and Ebiten

I started working for Ably recently, at the beginning of 2022. One of the first tasks I was given was to build a demo project that used one of the Ably SDKs. Working as a backend Go developer for the past 4 years made my choice of SDK easy. I definitely wanted to work with ably-go. I found myself wondering how to explore, debug and test an SDK in a visual way, rather like how the Postman API Client interacts with an API.

Categories: [development]
Tags: [go ebiten sdk]

September 27, 2019

Opening The Door To Continous Deployment with CloudFormation

I recently wrote an article called Hello Little Lambda which explained what Serverless Lambdas are and how to create them using the Amazon Web Services console. While it’s great that humans can create that a new Lambdas can be made using the AWS console, there are some significant advantages that can be gained from using code to create your Serverless Lambdas for you. When your Lambdas are created by code, they will always be created in the same predictable way, making their configuration less error prone.

Categories: [development]
Tags: [go serverless lambda]

September 17, 2019

Hello Little Lambda

What is Serverless? A Serverless Lambda is essentially code, written by you, which a cloud provider like Amazon or Google will run for you. Your code gets run on a cloud providers servers on demand, as and when it is needed. The benefit of having someone else run your code for you is that there is no need to worry about paying for idle servers, managing servers, keeping servers secure, upgrading servers, ensuring servers have capacity and a whole plethora of other issues.

Categories: [development]
Tags: [go serverless lambda]

September 17, 2019

Writing about the Cloud

I used to write regularly. I haven’t written for over two years. I need to fix that. I purchased this domain, gathered up all my old stuff and moved it here. New site built (with Hugo & Netlify) and after much tweeking and adjusting I am happy with my creation. I feel ready to start writing again… Hey Rosie! What Happened? So much has happened since I last blogged, it is beyond crazy.

Categories: [development]
Tags: [serverless lambda continous deployment]

November 27, 2017

Language is Still Hindering Testing and The Hiring of Testers

It’s been a month now since I attended Test Bash Manchester. I heard two very powerful talks at that conference which have been swishing around in my brain for a while now. Both talks came from speakers that shared a desire to advance the craft of testing. The first talk was by Martin Hynie (@vds4), currently Director of Test Engineering at Medidata. The second talk was by Michael Bolton (@michaelbolton) a tester, collaborator, coach, consultant, author and Twitter super star.

Categories: [testing]
Tags: [conferences]

November 6, 2017

Test Bash Manchester 2017 Tweet by Tweet

I was very fortunate that I was able to attend my second ever Test Bash in Manchester. This year was better than last year as two of my co-workers (Hannah & Jack) came along for the ride. I got so excited seeing them get excited! I spent most of the conference day scribbling notes again. However unlike last year where I mostly wrote text in a pad. This year I had plain paper and used coloured pens.

Categories: [testing]
Tags: [conferences]

September 27, 2017

Learning to Talk - Finding your Voice and Telling a Story

At the start of August I attended North East Agile Testing (NEAT) meet up at Campus North in Newcastle. While I feel I am active within the software testing community (through Slack, Twitter, blogging etc.) this was actually the first time I had ever attended a face to face testing event. While at NEAT I found it easy to express my views about testing (possibly helped by the free beer) and tried to share my experience by answering some of the questions which were being asked.

Categories: [testing]
Tags: [public-speaking]

April 19, 2017

Help Your Testers Succeed in 8 Minutes

2017 has been a stressful year for me so far. I bought a really ugly flat in February, then found myself with two months to make it habitable and move into it. While frantically arranging appointments with trades people and deliveries of essential things (like carpet and furniture), a call for speakers came up for the Agile North East Lightning Talk competition. I was already so stressed out from trying to move house, the stress of giving a talk felt insignificant by comparison.

Categories: [testing]
Tags: [public-speaking]

February 28, 2017

Creating My First Web Application with Go

Learning Go I started learning Go in March 2016. I felt like I had reached a point with software testing where I would not be able to improve unless I started really putting more effort into my coding skills. I had previously written a bit of test automation in Python but I was seeing and reading lots of cool things about Go. I had heard that Go was 25 times faster than Python and I also really liked the Go song.

Categories: [development]
Tags: [go]

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