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...

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...