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Integrating your Rails project with GitLab review apps

My first foray into software development when I was a kid was as a web developer. I don’t admit this to many people, but the first language I ever learned halfway decently was PHP. I led a confused childhood. After that, though, I was introduced to Ruby on Rails, and I’ve been using it ever since. I don’t do web development professionally anymore, but I have a number of web-based side projects, making websites for friends or family....

July 24, 2017 · 11 min · Kyle
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Ubuntu Core: Making a factory image with private snaps

This is a follow-up to the ROS prototype to production on Ubuntu Core series to answer a question I received: “What if I want to make an image for the factory, but don’t want to make my snaps public?” This question is of course not robotics-specific, and neither is its answer. In this post we’ll cover two ways to do this. Before we start, you’ll need a little bit of an Ubuntu Core imaging background....

July 6, 2017 · 6 min · Kyle

Continuous acceptance tests for complex applications

So you’re developing a complex application. Maybe it has some really specific dependencies, or requires a lot of setup. In many cases (such as my own), it’s a web application. I have a suite of tests, varying all the way from unit tests through integration tests. The latter typically uses Selenium, and I often integrate it with Sauce Labs. I’ve written an article about this before. However, even those integration tests aren’t testing the real application: it’s not running against a production database, it’s not running with a production web server, and so on....

June 5, 2017 · 9 min · Kyle