How to write Python on an iPad

You read that right. I’ve been writing code on an iPad recently and in 2023 it actually works pretty well thanks to Github Code Spaces. The set up was pretty darn easy but once again my old nemesis PYTHONPATH came back to bite me. As such I’m going to document how I got it all working for those of you who want hyper mobile code writing without c... Read more 28 Jan 2023 - 6 minute read

How to setup the VSCode python unit test extension in subsystem linux

A small configuration tip that will hopefully help someone out there. Or probably me in a few months when I forget how to do this. Do you have Subsystem Linux? Are you using VSCode? Are you working on a Python projects with unit tests? Are you getting an annoying error like this when trying to use VSCode’s Testing extension? > /usr/bin/pytho... Read more 18 Jan 2023 - 2 minute read

How to get a segmentation violation in Go

Today I learned the important difference between “declaring” variables in Go with a starting value, and just “initializing” them. Turns out its important. Who knew? The problem When working with the AWS SDK for Go I was trying to list off a group of EKS clusters and do some work on each cluster. Pretty basic task. My first attempt at solving t... Read more 14 Nov 2022 - 2 minute read

How to use interfaces to create mocks in Golang unit tests

This post was inspired by a few months of adventures at my current company in trying to increase unit test coverage on a series of Go packages that make use of AWS, Azure, GCP and other related cloud SDKs. The issue of how to simulate responses from these SDK calls that were deeply imbedded into the source code is what inspired this eventual sol... Read more 27 Sep 2022 - 6 minute read

A bobblehead and a dev walk into a unit testing bar.

So it turns out that comical shaming can be an excellent motivator. This is the story of how a previous manager solved a persistent testing failure issue by making devs stare at a horse butt on their desk. Zombie Tests The system being developed had a pretty extensive suite of unit / integration tests that ran on a varying set of schedules. Th... Read more 08 Jun 2022 - 4 minute read