There are three rules applicable to all testing environments.  I’ve articulated one of the rules before but now I’ll add two more. Rule 1 – Dead Simple Tests must be dead simple to run.  It doesn’t matter what you’re testing.  It doesn’t matter if you’ve got 100% code coverage. It doesn’t matter if you’ve tested […]

It often surprises me that people who spend their whole day focusing on details, software developers, so often ask question in broad and generic terms.  Here’s some that I’ve heard over the years: Why should I learn Object Oriented Programming?  (I have been writing software for a while.  Long enough to remember the days before […]

A while back Scott Wlaschin posted a great blog post on what he called “Railway Oriented Programming.”  It’s a great treatment of a common problem in adopting functional programming; how to handle a chain of functions when one of the functions in the chain may return an error.  Of course stopping the chain when the […]

There’s an excellent and practical write-up on configuring an EC2 container to host a WordPress site here.  But there are a few minor amplifications I’d add.  So I thought I’d write them up here. 1.) As some folks noted in the comments, you should assign the Elastic IP address before you install WordPress.  Everything with WP […]

So recently I’ve been working on automating some interactions with a website.  Elixir’s Hound library is a great help, of course.  But I also ran across an interesting and unexpected benefit to pattern matching that greatly simplified some code. I was trying to dynamically build a URL to pass parameters. The URL would be in […]