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.

Notes From My Swarm to Kubernetes Migration

Luke Patterson Architecture, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Kubernetes Leave a Comment

Attention: This article was published over 3 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. While some topics are evergreen, technology moves fast, so please keep that in mind as you read the post.In this post, I’ll discuss how Iโ€™m currently working to migrate a suite of apps from Docker Swarm to Kubernetes. The client chose this …

Jamstack: Azure Serverless Functions App With React

Jamstack: Azure Serverless Function App With React

Matt McCandless Architecture, Articles, Azure, Development Technologies & Tools, Node.js, React Leave a Comment

A new trend of creating applications is emerging called Jamstack. No, this isnโ€™t slapping together your favorite flavor of jelly (grape is the best) with peanut butter and two pieces of bread. The intent is an architecture that is faster, more secure, and easier to scale. It focuses on pre-rending and decoupling. This way, the solutions created are more reliable and resilient than before.

Pre-rendering comes by the way of using a static website via a CDN for high availability and security. No more serving your React app via web server like weโ€™ve become accustomed to. It reduces cost and complexity by eliminating the regular maintenance and configuration of traditional servers.

Also, the idea of APIs and the ability to move them to things like Serverless functions creates more cost savings, elimination of traditional servers, and use of features only when they are requested. For more information, check out the Serverless website.

End-To-End Testing

Tips Learned From Years of Automated End-to-End Testing

Forrest Goyer Articles, Automation, Programming, Testing 1 Comment

Imagine for a moment that weโ€™re getting ready to publish a new app or feature. Following the principles of Test Driven Development (like we always do), we have created a full suite of unit tests. Weโ€™re never pressed for time, so weโ€™ve also built out full coverage integration and functional tests.

In order to ensure our front-end is behaving as expected, weโ€™ll need to either manually step through the application or just push our commit to the main branch and let our continuous integration pipeline do the building and testing for us. But, if we wrote our end-to-end (E2E) tests without automation in mind, we might find the results lacking in usefulnessโ€ฆ

This post isnโ€™t a discussion on what E2E testing is nor a tutorial on how to get started. For that, resources like Smartbear, CircleCI, and Playwright have already published articles and tutorials that do a great job of covering that ground. In this post, weโ€™ll talk through a few tips Iโ€™ve picked up over 5 years of championing fully automated end-to-end testing.