Brian

186: Developer and Team Productivity

May 12th, 2022  |  51 mins 7 secs

git metrics, productivity

Being productive is obviously a good thing. Can we measure it? Should we measure it?
Nick Hodges joins the show to discuss the good and the bad of developer and team productivity, including how we can improve productivity.

185: Python + Django + Rich + Testing == Awesome

May 11th, 2022  |  20 mins 55 secs

django, python, rich, unittest

Django has a handful of console commands to help manage and develop sites.
django-rich adds color and nice formatting.
In a recent release, django-rich also add nice colorized tracebacks to the Django test runner.

184: Twisted and Testing Event Driven / Asynchronous Applications - Glyph

March 21st, 2022  |  41 mins 16 secs

Twisted has been supporting asynchronous / event driven applications way before asyncio.
Twisted, and Glyph, have also been encouraging automated tests for a very long time.

For testing asynchronous or event driven systems, Twisted uses a technique that should be usable by other applications, even those using asyncio or other event driven architectures.

183: Managing Software Teams - Ryan Cheley

March 16th, 2022  |  47 mins 48 secs

managing software teams

Ryan Cheley joins me today to talk about some challenges of managing software teams, and how to handle them.
We end up talking about a lot of skills that are excellent for software engineers as well as managers.

182: An Unorthodox Technical Interview and Hiring Process - Nathan Aschbacher

March 8th, 2022  |  47 mins 50 secs

technical hiring, technical interview

Don't you just love technical interviews, with someone who just saw your resume or CV 5 minutes ago asking you to write some code on a whiteboard
probably code that has nothing to do with anything you've done before or anything you will do at the company.

No? Neither does Nathan Aschbacher.
So when he started building the team at his company, he decided to do things differently.

181: Boost Your Django DX - Adam Johnson

February 28th, 2022  |  27 mins 32 secs

developer experience, django

We talk with Adam Johnson about his new book, "Boost Your Django DX".

180: Lean TDD

February 21st, 2022  |  26 mins 5 secs

lean software development, lean tdd, tdd

Lean TDD is an attempt to reconcile some conflicting aspects of Test Driven Development and Lean Software Development.

179: Exploratory Testing

February 8th, 2022  |  11 mins 39 secs

software testing

Exploratory testing is absolutely an essential part of a testing strategy.
This episode discusses what exploratory testing is, its benefits, and how it fits within a framework of relying on automated tests for most of our testing.

178: The Five Factors of Automated Software Testing

January 31st, 2022  |  10 mins 26 secs

software testing

"There are five practical reasons that we write tests. Whether we realize it or not, our personal testing philosophy is based on how we judge the relative importance of these reasons." - Sarah Mei
This episode discusses the factors.

177: Unit Test vs Integration Test and The Testing Trophy

January 27th, 2022  |  21 mins 39 secs

integration tests, testing trophy, unit tests

A recent Twitter thread by Simon Willison reminded me that I've been meaning to do an episode on the testing trophy.
This discussion is about the distinction between unit and integration tests, what those terms mean, and where we should spend our testing time.

176: SaaS Side Projects

January 18th, 2022  |  26 mins 8 secs

saas, side projects

The idea of having a software as a service product sound great, doesn't it? This episode discusses some of the hurdles from idea to first customer.

175: Who Should Do QA?

January 12th, 2022  |  13 mins 6 secs

qa, software testing

Who should do QA? How does that change with different projects and teams? What does "doing QA" mean, anyway?
Answering these questions are the goals of this episode.

174: pseudo-TDD - Paul Ganssle

December 22nd, 2021  |  39 mins 24 secs

git, pytest, tdd

In this episode, I talk with Paul Ganssle about a fun workflow that he calls pseudo-TDD.
Pseudo-TDD is a way to keep your commit history clean and your tests passing with each commit.
This workflow includes using pytest xfail and some semi-advanced version control features.

173: Why NOT unittest?

December 17th, 2021  |  23 mins 30 secs

pytest, python, unittest, xunit

unittest is an xUnit style framework, which makes it fatally flawed for software testing.
This episode is my opinion of "Why NOT unittest?", or more broadly, "What are the fatal flaws of xUnit?"

172: Designing Better Software with a Prototype Mindset

November 30th, 2021  |  6 mins 53 secs

software design

A prototype is a a preliminary model of something, from which other forms are developed or copied.
This episode is about growing better designed software with the help of a prototype mindset.

171: How and why I use pytest's xfail - Paul Ganssle

November 22nd, 2021  |  38 mins 26 secs

pytest, xfail

Paul Ganssle, is a software developer at Google, core Python dev, and open source maintainer for many projects, has some thoughts about pytest's xfail.
He was an early skeptic of using xfail, and is now an proponent of the feature.
In this episode, we talk about some open source workflows that are possible because of xfail.