The main image for this article shows all my GitHub contributions for the past year (roughly April 2023 through March 2024). Check it out. Notice anything? . My contributions pretty much stopped around August 2023. . Why? . That’s when I changed jobs. Until July 2023, all my professional coding work went into open source repositories in GitHub. After changing jobs, all my professional coding work went into closed source repositories in Azure DevOps. Did I suddenly stop coding at that time? No. In fact, I did more coding – and arguably more serious development work – at the second job. Tech so ..read more

All software engineers are the same, right? Well, not exactly. There is a strata of different seniority levels, each with its own expectations for experience, responsibilities, and pay. This article is a concise collection of my observations on seniority levels for software engineers. The levels Every company is different, but I’ve seen most companies coalesce around the following levels: Level Responsibilities In Plain Terms Entry Do what you are told. Learn as much as you can. “What’s a cookie?” Intermediate Complete tasks independently. Get things done. Be a good team player. “I bake ..read more

Today, I have very exciting news to share: I have accepted a new position as Principal Architect at Cycle Labs! This is a wonderful new job opportunity for me. Watch the video below to learn more: So, what is Cycle? Cycle is a way of testing software from inspiration to implementation. Cycle Labs provides an end-to-end test automation platform for the Cycle Testing Process that targets enterprise software, specifically in supply chain and warehouse management. It can test everything from web UIs to APIs, desktop apps, and even green screen terminals. The cornerstone of the platform is CycleSc ..read more

It’s no secret that ! Seattle has several excellent tea establishments, and each one is special. In this post, I list my top twelve favorite tea shops that I enjoy whenever I visit. This is my personal list of favorites in no particular order – it’s not a comprehensive ranking because, quite frankly, there are so many tea shops I haven’t yet tried! #1. Xing Fu Tang Xing Fu Tang is one of the best boba brands to come out of Taiwan. They pride themselves on their handmade brown sugar boba. At their locations in Taiwan, you can actually see them knead the tapioca dough and feed it through the mac ..read more

Playwright is an awesome new web testing framework, and it can help you take a modern approach to web development. In this article, let’s learn how. Asking tough questions about testing Let me ask you a series of questions: Question 1: Do you like it when bugs happen in your code? Most likely not. Bugs are problems. They shouldn’t happen in the first place, and they require effort to fix. They’re a big hassle. Question 2: Would you rather let those bugs ship to production? Absolutely not! We want to fix bugs before users ever see them. Serious bugs could cause a lot of damage to syst ..read more

This article is based on my talk at PyCon US 2023. The web app under test and most of the example code is written in Python, but the information presented is applicable to any stack. There are several great tools and frameworks for automating browser-based web UI testing these days. Personally, I gravitate towards open source projects that require coding skills to use, rather than low-code/no-code automation tools. The big three browser automation tools right now are Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright. There are other great tools, too, but these three seem to be the ones everyone is talking abo ..read more

Someone recently asked me this question: I’m developing a pytest project to test an API. How can I pass environment information into my tests? I need to run tests against different environments like DEV, TEST, and PROD. Each environment has a different URL and a unique set of users. This is a common problem for automated test suites, not just in Python or pytest. Any information a test needs about the environment under test is called configuration metadata. URLs and user accounts are common configuration metadata values. Tests need to know what site to hit and how to authenticate. Using conf ..read more

Note: For this article, I’m going to focus on environment variables for UNIX based operating systems like macOS and Linux. Environment variables are both a blessing and a curse. They let you easily pass data into processes like applications, scripts, and containers. I develop lots of test automation projects, and environment variables are one of the most common mechanisms for passing test inputs. For example, when I run a test suite against a web app, I might need to set inputs like this: export BASE_URL="http://my.website.com/" export USERNAME="pandy" export PASSWORD="DandyAndySugarCandy" e ..read more

I started Boa Constrictor back in 2018 because I loathed page objects. On a previous project, I saw page objects balloon to several thousand lines long with duplicative methods. Developing new tests became a nightmare, and about 10% of tests failed daily because they didn’t handle waiting properly. So, while preparing a test strategy at a new company, I invested time in learning the Screenplay Pattern. To be honest, the pattern seemed a bit confusing at first, but I was willing to try anything other than page objects again. Eventually, it clicked for me: Actors use Abilities to perform Interac ..read more

Boa Constrictor is the .NET Screenplay Pattern. It helps you make better interactions for better test automation! I originally created Boa Constrictor starting in 2018 as the cornerstone of PrecisionLender‘s end-to-end test automation project. In October 2020, my team and I released it as an open source project hosted on GitHub. Since then, the Boa Constrictor NuGet package has been downloaded over 44K times, and my team and I have shared the project through multiple conference talks and webinars. It’s awesome to see the project really take off! Unfortunately, Boa Constrictor has had very litt ..read more