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Rachel Walker

Rachel has worked in software for 9+ years as a developer and a team lead. Her work has primarily been Java-based, but she has also worked with a variety of web frameworks. She has a background in migrating legacy monolithic applications to web frameworks and microservices. When she isn't writing code, she is likely working in her vegetable garden with her dogs or losing sleep thinking about the social construction of time measurements.

Automating Flutter Deployments: Part 2 – Screenshots

Rachel Walker Articles, Automation, Development Technologies & Tools, Flutter Leave a Comment

Recently, I worked on automating some internal processes for building and releasing Flutter applications. Part of this work has involved integrating integration test runs and screenshots as part of the release and deployment process.

I wanted to be able to use the same set of tests to validate our code on Android and iOS devices without having to write large amounts of platform-specific code or configuration. These tests needed to be able to integrate with Fastlane, so they can be utilized by CI/CD. Specifically, this restricted setup runs using command line tools with no manual steps in Xcode or Android Studio, aside project level configuration.

This blog is Part 2 of a three-part series exploring automating Flutter CI/CD on CircleCI. Part 1 covered setting up Fastlane to build and deploy applications locally, this post outlines automating screenshot capture and test runs, and part 3 discusses configuring CircleCI to automate these processes.

Automating Flutter Deployments: Part 1 – Fastlane Configuration

Rachel Walker Articles, Automation, Development Technologies & Tools, Flutter, Tutorial Leave a Comment

This blog is Part 1 of a three-part series exploring automating Flutter CI/CD on CircleCI. This post covers setting Fastlane to build and deploy applications, Part 2 will outline automating screenshot capture and test runs, and Part 3 will discuss configuring CircleCI to automate these processes.

The documentation for configuring Fastlane for Flutter is fairly comprehensive, however now that I have done it once, there are some things I wish I had known. As mentioned, this blog post will go through the steps for setting up Fastlane to run locally and provide some advice and resources for structuring the setup to easily migrate to a CI/CD platform.

Scripting Development Environment Setup with tmux

Scripting Development Environment Setup with tmux

Rachel Walker Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Recently, I found myself in a position that developers often face โ€“ setting up a complicated local development environment.

My mission: get 8-10 local services up and running using a variety of technologies to test my code prior to merging to a shared environment. Armed with several outdated READMEs, my terminal, and some dire warnings about which services would likely crash my machine, I dove in.

The following blog is my story of writing scripts that utilize tmux to impose some order on the setup process.

Angular Drag and Drop

Angular Material Drag and Drop โ€“ Strengths and Limitations

Rachel Walker Angular, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming 3 Comments

When Drag and Drop was introduced to the Angular Material/CDK in version 7, it promised to support free dragging, interactive lists, and other common drag and drop operations without third-party library dependencies. Since that initial release, it has received consistent updates to further that goal.

In this blog post, I will be exploring some of the strengths and limitations of the Module that I encountered while implementing both simple and complex drag and drop functionality with CDK version 13.3.5.