sebastiandaschner news

Welcome to another issue of my newsletter.

It’s now almost exactly a year ago that I’ve come back from what was supposed to be my last in-person conference, SnowOne in Novisibirsk, Siberia, Russia. The event was very enjoyable and I joined some of the speakers on the skiing trip to Sheregesh, a gorgeous place, and one of the most remote locations I’ve been to, located somewhere close to Kazakhstan and Mongolia. You can see some impressions of the skiing trip here.

What’s new

Creating effective UI tests with Selenium

I’ve created a video in which I’m showing how to create effective UI system tests with Selenium. In my previous video course on effective testing, I’ve introduced the coffee shop application, which I’ve enhanced with some basic HTML views.

You can find the video here

The point of this video is to show the necessity of constructing abstraction layers and using delegation to keep our tests maintainable and comprehensible. This is especially true for more complex system test setups.

Selenium is a powerful web driver technology, to programmatically simulate user behavior in a browser, and helps us to create UI system tests.

Also, after the recording was finished, I was pointed to Selenide, a framework that is based on Selenium and that aims to provide a more concise developer experience for UI tests. Andrei Solntsev was so nice to provide a pull request to my project that changed the underlying structure to Selenide. You can check out this version in the coffee-testing project.

I think, this once again showed the point of constructing clear abstractions; only the implementation details changed and we didn’t have to modify our actual test scenarios.

Interview with Cliff Click — The Effective Developer podcast

I had the pleasure to interview Cliff Click, one of the core contributors of Java’s HotSpot engine, an expert on all things compilers and programming languages, and an inspiration on developer productivity.

In the interview, we talked about Cliff’s ideal day with regards to productivity, structuring ones day, dealing with the COVID situation, distractions, notifications, AA programming language, time zones, distributed teams, editors, emacs vs. IDEs, build tools, Make, testing cycles, turnaround times, mechanical keyboards, workstation equipment, headphones, time planning, do the hard stuff first, saying no, priorities, reading, life changing events, self-improvement, T. Harv Eker, automation, cost-benefit trade-offs, and long-term investments.

Check out the episode here.

Thanks a lot for reading and see you next time!