I started working for Ably recently, at the beginning of 2022. One of the first tasks I was given was to build a demo project that used one of the Ably SDKs. Working as a backend Go developer for the past 4 years made my choice of SDK easy. I definitely wanted to work with ably-go. I found myself wondering how to explore, debug and test an SDK in a visual way, rather like how the Postman API Client interacts with an API.

I recently wrote an article called Hello Little Lambda which explained what Serverless Lambdas are and how to create them using the Amazon Web Services console. While it’s great that humans can create that a new Lambdas can be made using the AWS console, there are some significant advantages that can be gained from using code to create your Serverless Lambdas for you. When your Lambdas are created by code, they will always be created in the same predictable way, making their configuration less error prone.

What is Serverless? A Serverless Lambda is essentially code, written by you, which a cloud provider like Amazon or Google will run for you. Your code gets run on a cloud providers servers on demand, as and when it is needed. The benefit of having someone else run your code for you is that there is no need to worry about paying for idle servers, managing servers, keeping servers secure, upgrading servers, ensuring servers have capacity and a whole plethora of other issues.

I used to write regularly. I haven’t written for over two years. I need to fix that. I purchased this domain, gathered up all my old stuff and moved it here. New site built (with Hugo & Netlify) and after much tweeking and adjusting I am happy with my creation. I feel ready to start writing again… Hey Rosie! What Happened? So much has happened since I last blogged, it is beyond crazy.

Learning Go I started learning Go in March 2016. I felt like I had reached a point with software testing where I would not be able to improve unless I started really putting more effort into my coding skills. I had previously written a bit of test automation in Python but I was seeing and reading lots of cool things about Go. I had heard that Go was 25 times faster than Python and I also really liked the Go song.

Back in May I taught myself a programming language called R so that I could solve the problem of analysing large amounts of data collected as part of a survey of software testers. After writing some R code to analyse the data from my survey and blogging about the findings I realised something. I was sharing my findings with other people mainly through static images, graphs and charts. I felt like there were a large number of combinations and queries that could be applied to the data and I wasn’t able to document all of them.

I've recently been lucky enough to be involved with a new software development project from the very start. One of the advantages of being the first Test Engineer on the project was that I was able to help implement and set up test automation on the project from the very beginning. Frequently software development projects see test automation as an after-thought and try implement it later, when the software is already quite advanced.

Blah blah automation. Blah blah Selenium. Apparently automated testing is what all the cool kids are doing these days. I’m not naive enough to believe that automated testing is some kind of magic spell that when cast the software will test itself and suddenly reveal the location of all the bugs. But, having experienced first hand the pain of long drawn out manual regression testing, if ANYTHING helps ease even a small amount of that pain - I want to know about it!