Thoughts about software development

For years I've been interested in home automation. I've had remote controllable outlets from a few different manufacturers but I've never been quite satisfied with just the remote. What if I could control my outlets within my local network from any device, now that's something I wanted to have. Controlling outlets from computer   A few years back I bought a three pack of remote controllable nexa outlets. A while ago I discovered that another company manufactured a control unit that's plugged in to a USB port and best of all they provided linux software for it. To make full use of these I'd need a computer that's always on and that's where I could make use of Raspberry Pi. Setting up outlets I had already set up my outlets with the remote that came in the retail pack just follow the manufacturer instructions. It might be possible to configure the outlets completely via the software at least for some brands but I haven't tried it so I c...

Few weeks ago in the middle of my summer vacation I had a sudden motivation spike when I was browsing my backlog/notepad (analog i.e. paper & pen) where I write down ideas or problems I'd like solve or try out at some point. Two items in the backlog caught my eye and those two produced a third idea in the form of this blog post. Backlog items On my backlog I had two separate items that caught my interest. First item on backlog was a utility library for validating Finnish social security numbers (SSN, HeTu, henkilötunnus) and business identifications (y-tunnus). Both of these have predefined rules on how they are formed and I have implemented utilities for these same validations a few times in the past. I have discussed about the need for these utilities many times and last time just before my summer vacation with my colleagues because these exact utilities don't exist in the public repositories or if they do we haven't found them and many of us had implemented t...

Recently I joined a project that was built on node.js and views were generated via jade templates. The node.js backend had a few very basic tests in the form of unit tests and frontend didn't have any tests. One of my tasks was to improve the test coverage. Following is a short description of the problem and a example solution how I resolved it. Unit testing I started by going through the existing tests and refactoring those so that they worked as expected and added tests for the functionality I had implemented previously. These tests were run via mocha.js and utilized chai.js and supertest . These were very mainly unit tests except for the one's that utilized supertest which tested that the web application responded correctly to very basic http requests to routes like / or /login . I want more In a previous project that I worked in we had mocha tests that were run in a browser so that it tested the running application within a iframe via mocha. I always liked t...

Recently I've had the opportunity to work with cloud environments. Cloud environments bring benefits but also some new issues or challenges that have to be taken into account. Benefits One of the greatest benefits of cloud environments is the scalability i.e. with a single command one instance can be spawned to two, three or twenty instances that are behind some load balancer service of the cloud provider appearing as a single instance to the outside world. With the simplicity that cloud environments provide the developers can start deploying software as soon as there's something to deploy and keep deploying all the time. In the best case scenario test and production environments can be up and running since day one. Some services also provide a nice feature of roll backing quickly to previous versions if the latest version has introduced a bug that didn't exist previously. Challenges As a developer I've set up various development and testing environments but...