Essential Features

Today I uninstalled Cal, a calendar app for my android phone. I liked Cal when I first installed it. It’s stylish, chic, and minimalist, as you can see from my below screenshots: The problem is, these three screens I’ve shown you? Are the only real screens in the app, save a settings screen. Do you see the problem yet? How about this: when I got to my hairdresser next week, I’m going to want to schedule another appointment, 3 months out. Continue reading

Teatime: A/B Testing

Welcome back to Teatime! This is a weekly feature in which we sip tea and discuss some topic related to quality. Feel free to bring your tea and join in with questions in the comments section. Tea of the week: All the Lemon! by The Tea Dude. I know I usually recommend black teas, but I’ve got a sore throat this week, and lemon tisane hits the spot perfectly. Today’s Topic: Improving websites, with science! Continue reading

Quick Tip: How to get your Facebook and Google calendars in the same view

In looking for a replacement for Sunrise.am (which shuts down next week), I keep being stymed by my inability to find a calendar that can do everything. I have a work calendar on Outlook, a personal calendar on Google, and my steampunk group uses Facebook events. I can typically find an app that will do two of the above, usually leaving out Facebook, but never all three. The last time I looked I don’t think this was possible, but now you can import your Facebook calendar into Google, allowing the apps on your smartphone to access it as a Google calendar. Continue reading

The Second Client Effect

I could have sworn there was an established name for this, but nobody I’ve asked can come up with an example, and my question on programmers.se got downvotes and close votes within an hour, so I guess I’ll just name it myself 🙂 We try to design sometimes for pluggability, and for the general case. We sit and we diagram and we think about broad use cases. And we’re often very wrong; that’s why YAGNI exists. Continue reading

Selenium Grid on Docker and Vagrant: Part 2

Last time we got Vagrant configured to run a single VM with three docker containers: a Selenium Grid hub, a Chrome node, and a Firefox node. This is a good start, but I wanted to configure a Selendroid node to round out the browser selection. That’s when things got a little… messy. So upon investigation into how the Docker images I was already using were constructed, I discovered a few key points: Continue reading

Selenium Grid on Docker and Vagrant: Part 1

I’ve been putting together a quick proof-of-concept here at work about how we could use Docker to run a Selenium Grid. I’m not sure we’ll go that route, but I was curious how it could be done. One of the main advantages of doing this sort of rough proof in Vagrant is that it becomes very portable. At the end of the day, I have a mini testing cloud I can run my tests against — and any member of my team can check out a few files and have their own mini testing cloud. Continue reading

Teatime: Testing Large Domains

Welcome back to Teatime! This is a (semi-)weekly feature in which we sip tea and discuss some topic related to quality. Feel free to bring your tea and join in with questions in the comments section. Tea of the week: Dragon Pearls by Teavana. My grandmother gave me some of this for my birthday a few years back, and it’s become one of my favorite (and most expensive!) teas since. Continue reading