Month: April 2024

E2eTests

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

Recently I have been working with some e2e tests. These run inside the ci build and all external services are mocked and dockerised.

Given the frontend is typescript and has an Elixir backend this is the only point we can test the integration of the two.

The existing system uses Cypress. This has been slow and unreliable. We sometimes get errors that we cannot manually recreate.

I have been working on moving to Playwright. We lose the gherkin format but gain faster more reliable tests.

I have just found https://github.com/HamedStack/HamedStack.Playwright.Screenplay which provides some abstractions to help the testing.

Storybook as a software design tool

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

I recently found Storybook to be a great means of simplifying the design of a component.
Storybook is a component design tool. You build a catlog of examples showing how a component can be used.

This is great for ensuring system consistency as it is possible to lay out all possible options for a component. Given that it can be time consuming to achieve certain states by using a full application, having all of the possible states laid out in one place is a big time saver.

I am working with a react application that uses both Relay and Formik. I am just getting the hang of using Formik in storybook. Relay is more difficult.

In typical open source fashion a component exists because someone had a problem to solve. However when people move on to new projects (or the project is replaced) these eventually become abandoned. The relay storybook components are in this state. It worked once, but is now broken by the continuously moving environment.
This leaves two choices: try to fix the library or work around the limitation.

Currently I am using the work-around by extracting “pure” components and testing them.
For example I could put all of a dialog box into a component and isolate it from the effect button.

Why are we still messing with the clocks?

~ chriseyre2000 ~ Leave a comment

Last weekend was the start of British Summer Time, which is described as daylight saving.
This was implemented during WWII and is best charcterised as a politicians sigilism.

We must do something.

This is something.

We must do this.

The net effect of moving all the clocks an hour earlier is to inflict jet lag on an entire country for 2 weeks. During that time the sun will be rising earlier anyway so it will be as light when you wake up as if the system had not been imposed.

The argument that it helps farmers is demonstrably crazy. Pet owners know how confused they are at randomly changing meal times. Can you imagine how confused a milking cow herd would be!