Thoughts about software development

Every now and then I do some research on browser testing. More specifically I try to find and evaluate what kind of ready to use solutions or libraries have emerged since my previous research or if some of the previously tested solutions has come up with something new. Back in September 2017 I had some extra time on my hands and I used a couple of days to see what are the new and interesting solutions at that time. I came across some tools that I have used in the past and found two new interesting options in which one stood out. Say hello to TestCafe The most interesting solution that I found was called TestCafe . It's a open source Node.js library from a company called Developer Express Inc. They also have a commercial product called TestCafe ( confusing ) which I haven't tried as the open source library provided everything I was interested in and it seemed to be under active development . The thing that caught my interest at first was that this library doesn't depen...

I've had my DIY home automation system for controlling outlets and reading sensor data running for about two years now. The system has been working fine and I haven't had any need to touch the code since I added the sensor reading to it, until a few months back. Need for new functionality Few months ago I got a new IoT toy for a lend from a friend until I'd get my own toys, a ruuvitag sensor beacon. Ever since I found the ruuvitag for the first time from kickstarter I had the idea of getting a bunch of ruuvitags and adding their weather station sensor readings as part of my home automation system. The original home automation backend included only tellstick compatible devices and was written in Python, and in my mind it was kind of a hack. The ruuvitag beacons communicate via BLE i.e. Bluetooth Low Energy and that meant that I needed to add functionality to read the beacon data via bluetooth. I found a ruuvitag Python library and initially thought that I'd just...

Previously I set up a simple home automation system for controlling outlets at home. So far I've used the system for controlling various lights at our home. I've been satisfied with oulet controlling via browser but I wanted something more. Objective I had a idea of temperature and humidity monitoring via Raspberry Pi. I was already browsing for electronics components needed for building a system with sensors but buying single components seemed a bit expensive and I would also have to actually connect all the components to RPi and write the code to read the sensor data. Mainly because of the price the components I started looking for a pre-built system with the preferred sensors. Almost immediately I came across Proove's sensor that has indoor and outdoor temperature sensors and a indoor humidity sensor. Best part of the pre-built system is that it's already compatible with TellStick system that I used for controlling outlets. I decided to buy the pre-built s...

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...

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...

Everybody has their favorite when it comes to cars, sports or jeans and the same goes for work tools. Some prefer OS X over Linux or Maven over Gradle and don't even get me started on browser wars. I've had my share of trying out different tools to choose the ones I want to use but every now and then I change some of my tools. This time I'm telling what my day to day tools currently are and why I changed one of them. The solid foundation When I get to choose my tools there's one solid foundation that works as a base for all other tools. This has been my number one choice for over ten years with a little variety over time. Linux. No question about it, I've used for years, I know my way around it and it offers everything I need in work and at home. The variety comes from different distributions and desktop environments although those have also been very stable for the past four or five years, Debian has the stability I want and XFCE offers everything I need fr...

Previously I got my first version of simple todo rest service working with scala and play framework and had some ideas what to do next. Since then I've implemented a second version of the rest service, this time backed by MongoDB . I also managed to create a simple web application as a user interface for the service. TL;DR; https://github.com/jorilytter/simple-todo/tree/mongodb-integration https://github.com/jorilytter/simple-todo-ui MongoDB with scala This was a idea that I had earlier and the actual implementation was pretty straightforward with the help of salat library. Integrating salat with play framework required me to implement a custom context but salat documentation already provided this solution so it was just a matter of reading the documentation. Other issue that I faced was with reading and writing json documents but that's where play's documentation provided the needed answers after some initial searches with google. Like before the implem...