System administration is a special are of IT. It also has a special place in my heart. It is an interesting mixture of all the other disciplines, both common across the whole industry, and at the same time unique for each person, company, and geographical location. When I have something to say or share about system administration, I use this category.
The brand new and shiny Fedora 28 has been released! This one brings updates to Gnome, improved battery life, and external repositories for things like Google Chrome browser and Nvidia proprietary drivers.
Upgrading from Fedora 27 is easy and painless – I’ve tried it myself and all went without any problems at all.
Anybody working with git is probably well familiar with the way to undo the non-committed changes:
git reset --hard
As useful as the above command is, it still leaves some room for improvement. The above command will only undo non-committed changes on the files that git is tracking. Often, this would leave a whole bunch of files and directories in place, which are not tracked by git. So far, I’ve been using a really complicated approach for removing them, which involves git status, grep, cut, xargs, and rm. Yuck.
Turns out there is a better way, which I found in “Stupid git tricks” article:
git clean -df .
This one will forcefully remove all untracked files and directories from the current directory. Combining these two commands together results in all non-committed changes being undone, no matter if they are on tracked files or not. Cool!
“Understanding AD Access Control Entries” is a quick and simple article describing some of the madness of the Active Directory access control entities. This is particularly useful for those of us who had to deal with Active Directory, without having much experience with MS Windows. I’m sure this will come handy again in the future.
Quality Assurance is an important part of the software development. There are many tools available that help with a variety of problems in this domain. At work, we have already been using quite a few of them – mostly those that deal with automated testing – PHPUnit, PHP CodeSniffer, Nightwatch.js, TravisCI, BitBucket Pipelines, and more.
But the above tools are mostly for software developers. With the expansion of our quality assurance efforts, I am looking at some more tools and this time around, those that are aimed more towards QA engineers and testers. One particular area that I am currently very interested in is the tool for test (and requirements) management.
My experience in this area is very limited. I just know that such tools do exist. Most of them are propitiatory and expensive, and are used by large organizations. We are not a large company. Our needs are simpler. And our budget for this is not great yet.
So, here is what I’m looking for:
If you know of a tool that matches all or most of the above, please let me know.
Continue reading Free and Open Source Test Management Software