September 2014 Summaries

Devon Noel de Tilly, a QA Engineer at 500px, discusses her multifaceted role, which includes managing CI setup on Semaphore, maintaining automated tests, and collaborating closely with developers and sysadmins. At 500px, the workflow for feature development is highly collaborative and often stems from developer and designer ideas during monthly hack days, with user feedback and executive input also playing significant roles. Teams at 500px operate with a degree of autonomy, allowing them to choose their approach to development, which can vary significantly between teams, such as the platform team's preference for small, incremental tasks versus the web team's collective approach. The company tackles technical debt proactively, using tools like Code Climate and relying on team members to periodically address it. For major features, 500px employs a microservices architecture, breaking away from a monolithic Rails app to improve efficiency, with some services rewritten in Go for better performance. The culture at 500px emphasizes ownership and autonomy, encouraging employees to work on projects they are passionate about, fostering a sense of responsibility and innovation.

Clojure's built-in testing library, clojure.test, is complemented by several alternatives, including Expectations by Jay Fields, which is promoted as a minimalist unit testing framework with the slogan "adding signal, removing noise." Expectations simplifies setup by integrating with tools like Emacs and IntelliJ and requires only a few configurations in project.clj. It enhances testing by offering a concise syntax and producing more informative, visually appealing output with features like default color coding and precise failure descriptions. The framework excels in testing collections, focusing on both equality and content, and aggressively minimizes noise by trimming unnecessary stack trace details. Additionally, Expectations provides advanced capabilities for testing side effects and controlling test execution time, making it a powerful tool for developers seeking more efficient and effective testing practices.

The platform update scheduled for September 24, 2014, marks the first release based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, introducing release candidate platforms that can be tested immediately by users through project settings. This approach aims to facilitate smoother transitions during updates, allowing users to revert to the previous stable version if necessary, and encourages feedback for final improvements. A new structured versioning system using a YYMM convention is also being implemented, with monthly major updates and potential incremental releases identified by minor version numbers. The update includes significant software upgrades, such as Firefox 32, ElasticSearch 1.3.2, Ruby updates, and PHP 5.6.0, among others, with a detailed changelog available for reference. Notably, this release will cease updates for Ubuntu 12.04, maintaining it only until January 1, 2015, while Ruby 2.1.3 and other software see version enhancements.

Semaphore has launched a collection of stickers available in various sizes to suit different occasions, inspired by the latest spring 2015 trends as advised by stylists. These stickers are available for purchase online, with worldwide shipping options. For those interested in discussing this new release, Semaphore invites users to join their Discord community.

In an interview with Michael Siegfried, a Senior Engineer at Procore, a cloud-based construction software company, insights are shared into how Procore leverages Semaphore in its development processes to enhance efficiency and reliability. Procore offers a unified platform for construction companies to manage information, moving away from fragmented tools like Excel files. Their workflow involves thorough research and customer collaboration for feature development, ensuring integration across product, development, and quality assurance teams. For test writing, Procore utilizes Thoughtbot’s Rails testing guide and Better Specs, employing RSpec for specifications. Siegfried emphasizes the importance of practical refactoring, noting that it should only be pursued when justifiable. Semaphore plays a crucial role in their workflow by ensuring code quality and preventing bugs before deployment, which solidifies its importance in achieving seamless and dependable software updates.