What is the most elegant line of code you’ve seen?
Surprisingly, a lot of answers have a very weird definition of “elegant”. But still there are quite a few ones that are elegant indeed.
Category: Programming
A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.
GitHub : new look
GitHub blog announced a new look and navigation for the programmers’ best friend. Have a look at some of the screenshots, say “WOW!” and rush back to your repositories, looking for the magic “Enable Repository Next” button.
This being a big change and GitHub being such a crucial daily tool for so many people, the changes will be rolled out slowly. So you might need a bit of luck or time to see it right now. Gladly, my repositories do have the feature, and once switched to, they do look better. Navigation is simpler indeed, but will need a little getting used to, as I have it in the muscle memory by now. I also like a tiny bit of more color added, as the white and lightly not white were slightly disorienting after long coding and merging hours.
To the GitHub team: thank you guys, you are awesome! Please keep doing what you are doing – it’s obviously working.
GeoJSON – an open format for encoding a variety of geographic data structures
GeoJSON – an open format for encoding a variety of geographic data structures
Looks handy. Learned about it while reading the GitHub blog post on announcing the support for interactive display of GeoJSON files in repositories.
Going the SPA way
Andrei describes his experience building an SPA (Single Page Application) for mobile, using AngularJS framework and then some.
About 2 months ago I read/watched via RSS one article written by Dan Wahlin called Video Tutorial: AngularJS Fundamentals in 60-ish Minutes. This is without any doubt the best 70 minutes I’ve spent on YouTube in a long long time.
Water testing is not a term (for software testing)
I’ve been hearing the term “water testing” for one of the work projects that I am involved in. The term is used to describe the stage of the project when it’s available on the production servers with live data, but open only to a subset of the users. After searching around for a bit, I can’t find a reference to this term anywhere, except the water industry:
Water testing is a broad description for various procedures used to analyze water quality.
So that of course sent me on to the path of finding the correct term. The closest by analogy that I heard of is “smoke testing“.
The plumbing industry started using the smoke test in 1875.
Later this usage seems to have been forgotten, leading some to believe the term originated in the electronics industry: “The phrase smoke test comes from [electronic] hardware testing. You plug in a new board and turn on the power. If you see smoke coming from the board, turn off the power. You don’t have to do any more testing.”
Specifically for software development and testing:
In computer programming and software testing, smoke testing is preliminary testing to reveal simple failures severe enough to reject a prospective software release. In this case, the smoke is metaphorical. A subset of test cases that cover the most important functionality of a component or system are selected and run, to ascertain if the most crucial functions of a program work correctly. For example, a smoke test may ask basic questions like “Does the program run?”, “Does it open a window?”, or “Does clicking the main button do anything?” The purpose is to determine whether the application is so badly broken that further testing is unnecessary. As the book “Lessons Learned in Software Testing” puts it, “smoke tests broadly cover product features in a limited time … if key features don’t work or if key bugs haven’t yet been fixed, your team won’t waste further time installing or testing”.
Smoke testing performed on a particular build is also known as a build verification test.
A daily build and smoke test is among industry best practices.
This sounds very much like “sanity testing“:
A sanity test or sanity check is a basic test to quickly evaluate whether a claim or the result of a calculation can possibly be true. It is a simple check to see if the produced material is rational (that the material’s creator was thinking rationally, applying sanity). The point of a sanity test is to rule out certain classes of obviously false results, not to catch every possible error. A rule-of-thumb may be checked to perform the test. The advantage of a sanity test, over performing a complete or rigorous test, is speed.
[…]
In computer science, a sanity test is a very brief run-through of the functionality of a computer program, system, calculation, or other analysis, to assure that part of the system or methodology works roughly as expected. This is often prior to a more exhaustive round of testing.
After reviewing all sorts of testing types, I think the correct term for our scenario is actually “beta testing“:
Beta testing comes after alpha testing and can be considered a form of external user acceptance testing. Versions of the software, known as beta versions, are released to a limited audience outside of the programming team. The software is released to groups of people so that further testing can ensure the product has few faults or bugs. Sometimes, beta versions are made available to the open public to increase the feedback field to a maximal number of future users.