Symlinks have been causing me grief lately.  Our build tool, buck, loves creating symlinks but publishes corrupt cache artefacts for any build rule that includes a symlink amongst it’s output.

We also wind up calling out to npm to manage JavaScript dependencies and it has an annoying (for us) habit of resolving symlinks when processing files and then failing to find required libraries because the node_modules folder was back where the symlink was, not with the original file. Mostly this problem is caused by buck creating so many symlinks.

I have three Benq GW2765 monitors which periodically report “No Signal Detected” for DisplayPort even when the computer it’s attached to recognises the monitor is present (displaying it in the monitors/displays list etc). Changing  the DisplayPort cable or plugging it into a different computer doesn’t help (I tried with both Mac OS X and Linux/Fedora machines), but HDMI and D-Sub connections work perfectly (but can’t support the full screen resolution). I can even disconnect a cable from a working monitor, plug it into a non-working monitor and it will continue to complain about no signal, but plug the cable back into the working monitor and it carries on working fine.

After any major Fedora upgrade my system loses the proprietary nvidia drivers that make X actually work (I’ve never successfully gotten the nouveau drivers to handle my card and multi-monitor setup) so the system reboots and simply presents an “oops, something went wrong” screen.

The issue seems to be that the nvidia driver doesn’t recompile for the new kernel, despite the fact that I’m using akmod packages which should in theory automatically recompile for new kernels.

One reason that automated UI tests can be unreliable is that they tend to be sensitive to what else is on screen at the time and even things like the current screen size. Developers running the tests locally also find it annoying to have windows opening and closing on their machine while the test runs and are unable to do anything else because their clicking might interfere with the test.

When an automated UI test fails, it can be hard to tell exactly what went wrong just from the failure message. The failure message typically just says that some element the test was looking for wasn’t found, but it doesn’t tell you what was there.  Was there an error message displayed instead? Was the operation still executing? Did something completely unexpected happen instead?

To answer those questions our DSL automatically captures a screenshot when any UI operation fails and we include a link to it in the failure message. That way when someone reviews the test result they can see exactly what was on screen which typically makes it straight forward to identify what went wrong and fix it.

So I can find this again easily in the future, to avoid introducing merge commits git pull –rebase is a great idea and you can make it the default behaviour with:

git config --global pull.rebase true

Found on Coderwall which has some further details.

I’ve recently started a little side project to create a java implementation of a CommonJS compiler: commonjs-java which is available on github under the Apache 2 license. It’s output is targeted at browsers, bundling together all the dependencies into one javascript file.

There are plenty of utilities that can do that for you on the command line or as part of a build process (e.g. browserify) and in most cases you should stick with them, but I had a couple of requirements that drove me to want a Java implementation:

Once an application goes live, it is absolutely essential that any future changes are able to be work with the existing data in production, typically by migrating it as changes are required. That existing data and the migrations applied to it are often the riskiest and least tested functions in the system. Mistakes in a migration will at best cause a multi-hour outage while backups are restored and more likely will subtly corrupt data, producing incorrect results that may go unnoticed for long periods making it impossible to roll back. At LMAX we reduce that risk by running compatibility tests.

Just like production code, you should assume things are going to go wrong in your tests and when it does you want good logging to help track down what happened and why. So just like production code, you should use a logging framework within your DSL, use meaningful log levels and think about what info you’d need in the logs if something went wrong (and what you don’t). There’s also a few things we’ve found very useful specifically in our test logging.

With Selenium 1, JavaScript alert and confirmation dialogs were intercepted by the Selenium JavaScript library so they never appeared on-screen and were accessed using selenium.isAlertPresent(), selenium.isConfirmationPresent(), selenium.chooseOkOnNextConfirmation() and similar methods.

With Selenium 2 aka WebDriver, the dialogs do appear on screen and you access them with webDriver.switchTo().alert() which returns an Alert instance for further interactions.

However, when you use WebDriverBackedSelenium to mix Selenium 1 and WebDriver APIs – for example, during migrations from one to the other – the alerts don’t appear on screen and webDriver.switchTo().alert() always throws a NoAlertPresentException. This makes migration problematic because selenium.chooseOkOnNextConfirmation() doesn’t have any effect if the next confirmation is triggered by an action performed directly through Web Driver.

Today LMAX Exchange has released ElementSpecification, a very small library we built to make working with selectors in selenium/WebDriver tests easier. It has three main aims:

• Make it easier to understand selectors by using a very English-like syntax
• Avoid common pitfalls when writing selectors that lead to either brittle or intermittent tests
• Strongly discourage writing overly complicated selectors.

Essentially, we use ElementSpecification anywhere that we would have written CSS or XPath selectors by hand. ElementSpecification will automatically select the most appropriate format to use – choosing between a simple ID selector, CSS or XPath.

In programming courses one of the first thing you’re taught is to avoid “magic literals” – numbers or strings that are hardcoded in the middle of an algorithm. The recommended solution is to extract them into a constant. Sometimes this is great advice, for example:

if (amount > 1000) {
  checkAdditionalAuthorization();
}

would be much more readable if we extracted a ADDITIONAL_AUTHORIZATION_THRESHOLD variable – primarily so the magic 1000 gets a name.