Posts6
Comments84
View on HN

Genuinely would like to know how anyone has managed to do both of:

write as many end-to-end and integration tests as you can

and

make sure your tests run fast enough to run the full set of tests after every commit

I'm a developer at Infoxchange, and we're actually looking for a senior dev to join our Melbourne team. Development of the Ask Izzy app was a collaboration between our team here and REA group, which goes to show the kind of thing you get to be a part of at Infoxchange.

In Melbourne, we have a small team working on a number of projects with Python, Django, Docker, Elasticsearch and React.js. We run some very modern tech, and we work really closely with our amazing ops team and testers.

If that sounds like your cup of tea, we'd love to talk to you! There's an ad for the position with more detail up on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs2/view/112633872 or if you prefer, you can email recruitment@infoxchange.org

Great stuff!

You're right about the data quality, it's a huge job and we have a fantastic team of people who work to keep the data up to date.

Another big challenge is trying to provide useful results in areas (especially remote areas) where we're either missing good data, or where there simply aren't any nearby services. Australia is a huge country and population density tends to be concentrated in a few places, but with a lot of smaller towns and cities scattered about, which can make finding geographically relevant results really difficult.

edit: minor edit for clarity

Just to expand on that a bit, the data is currently limited to our in-house database of services in Australia.

We are looking into including additional (Australian) data sources in the future (for instance, there are some open data sets which various government agencies make available that we'd like to include).

Hey jacalata, thanks for pointing this out. I've reproduced the issue as best I can, and AFAICT you should see a link on that page which says "Change you answers".

Clicking it should display a list of the answers you've chosen, and the top one should be your location. Clicking that should let you change your location.

If that doesn't work, drop me a line at jcrompton@infoxchange.org -- I'd love to get enough info from you to properly reproduce the bug so we can fix it.

Thanks!

It's worth noting that much of what Irvine lays out in this book is closer to Epicureanism than Stoicism, per say. For a better treatment of Stoicism, I'd recommend The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot.

If you want to understand Meditations and Marcus Aurelius, you should read The Inner Citadel by Pierre Hadot. For instance, there are good reasons for his writing in Greek, for the format of the book, for the repetitiveness, etc.

Tests generated by GUI systems are extremely fragile and you wouldn't them hanging around your codebase.

OTOH, often a video recording is a great way to demonstrate a bug without having to (be able to) write an automated test, and pretty easy for even a non-technical user to produce.

Why Class? 13 years ago

This is a really interesting point. It does seem like a lot of OOP/patterns books seem to talk about desktop apps that are quite different to your typical web app, which could be characterised (perhaps uncharitably) as CRUD with a bit of extra stuff glued on.

In fact, most of my experience with large codebases has been in web development, in which you're basically providing a nice front end to a database.

If databases are just structured data, then it seems a bit redundant to wrap that in an object-metaphor (e.g., with an ORM) and then use even more objects to perform operations on the data by way of those ORM-objects.

Django is a good example of the kind of thing I'm talking about. I've been thinking a fair bit lately about the limitations of this style of framework, and I wonder if this idea of functions operating on structured data might be a better way to approach things.

It sounds like Scala might be a good language to experiment with this kind of approach, as others have suggested elsewhere in this thread.

the government doesn't like to get the public riled up by terrorist threats

I'm quite sure that's exactly what the government likes to do. That's the very reason that "terrorism" is in the headlines as much as it is: it serves the government by allowing them to extend their powers and budgets enormously. Feed scary stories about "terrorism" to an uncritical public and they'll beg you to take away their "freedom" in exchange for greater "security".

Just wanted to say, NewsBlur and Pinboard are both big inspirations for me. It's awesome to see people making money off of open source software.