One of the biggest challenges in moving from unit tests to integration tests is provisioning external dependencies. Databases. Event brokers. LDAP. SMTP. Object storage. Other services that our application has to integrate with. Unit tests usually avoid those dependencies. Integration tests should not. At some point, the test has to

...even if the conference is online only Participation in the events like conferences and/or meetups was always a good idea. There are lots of articles about it eg. top ones 1 [https://curtiscoulter.com/why-do-people-attend-conferences-5-key-reasons-for-attendees-and-event-organizers/] , 2 [https://www.takeflyte.com/reasons-to-attend-conferences] or 3 [https://medium.com/swlh/attending-a-conference-is-worth-your-money-but-not-because-of-the-information-25256763b814] even

Sometimes I do not want to install cert-manager. Not because cert-manager is bad. It is the right answer for production. But for a sandbox cluster, a demo environment, or a short-lived test setup, installing cert-manager, configuring an Issuer, checking RBAC, and debugging the ACME flow can be more work than

Recently I needed to create a POC setup for a client where our software would run in a k8s cluster in IBM Cloud, and the authentication and authorization would be handled by some external user registry. Since we're in the IBM Cloud ecosystem, I thought of App ID

Using Docker on an M1 Mac for day-to-day activities is still a pain; a lot of plugins we use don't support the platform switch, and even when executed manually in the terminal, QEMU is painfully slow (I gave up after about 10 minutes of it processing the db2start

I was not looking for a startup clubhouse. I needed a place in Warsaw where I could work regularly without committing to a full private office. Home was convenient, but too isolated. Cafes were fine for two hours, but bad for calls and worse for focus. I wanted something central,

I had been working from home for quite a while. Long enough that the standing desk had dents in the right places. The lighting in the room was sorted for video calls. The chair had been replaced twice. So when most of the world switched to working from home in

I wanted HDR on an external monitor to be simpler than it was. The setup was ordinary enough: a MacBook Pro, macOS Catalina, and an LG 27UL850-W. On paper, the monitor supports HDR. It is a 27-inch 4K IPS panel with VESA DisplayHDR 400, USB-C, DisplayPort, HDMI, and 60W power

So we have an office now. My co-founder and I have been working remotely for more than eight years and for three at Smart Coders. That's quite a change, and there are a few reasons for it, some of them are driven by our clients. Anyways, we'

The Guardian writes [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/31/eu-recommend-member-states-abolish-daylight-saving-time] : > The European commission will recommend that EU member states abandon the practice of changing the clocks in spring and autumn, with many people in favour of staying on summer time throughout the year. Apparently 80% of 4.

There is nothing inherently wrong with assertTrue. Sometimes the thing you are testing is genuinely a boolean: assertTrue(featureFlag.isEnabled()); If that fails, the useful information is simply: The flag was not enabled. Fine. The problem starts when assertTrue is used to assert something richer than a boolean. For example:

Editor's note (2026-05-11): finished from a draft started in November 2017, a few weeks after the iPhone X launch. Treated as a period piece — context, links and conclusions reflect what we knew at the end of 2017. There are two interesting stories. One comes from Wired [https://www.

Rich Mogul, writing for Securosis [https://securosis.com/blog/face-id-is-the-future-of-security-authentication]: > Apple didn’t just throw a facial recognition sensor into the iPhone and replace a fingerprint sensor – they enabled a new security modality. I call this “continuous authentication”. I’ve been thinking about it ever since getting the new

I’ve been on vacation* since Friday afternoon, but I didn’t manage to close everything that needed to be closed before leaving. My wife also needed to finish some things for work, so both of us spent Monday and a chunk of Tuesday working. My wife came better prepared;

Editor's note (2026-05-11): this began life as a short September-2017 note about a project we were just starting. The body below is roughly as it stood at the time. The "Update" sections near the bottom are later additions — 2022, when IBM rebranded the product and we

I've been playing around with the Maven Release Plugin [123] and Versions Maven Plugin [123] in the context of IBM Jazz [jazz.net]. A couple of observations: 1. If you want to use mvn release:prepare, you need to be in full control of all your dependencies; all