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.

FHIR APIs

Part 1: Creating an FHIR API – Google or Azure?

Zach Gardner API Development, Articles, Cloud, Creating an FHIR API, Security, Tutorial Leave a Comment

Data interoperability is one of the hardest problems in Healthcare IT. The most popular approach is to exchange HL7v2 messages between systems. These pipe-delimited messages are difficult to read by a human and often need additional customizations between implementations.

The next major paradigm shift is towards FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), a JSON-based standard that is evolving ahead of the needs of the industry. Cloud vendors like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are trying to lay their claim to be the one-stop shop for healthcare on the cloud.

This blog is part of a 4 part series diving into an actual use case I recently encountered while working with a client. I had to stand up an FHIR repository/API for 2+ million patients that could be used by hundreds of users every day, as well as countless background processes.

better sort in JavaScript

Better Sort Ordering in JavaScript

Lou Mauget Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, JavaScript, Programming, Tutorial 2 Comments

In this post, I show how to cajole Array.sort() into producing the following order. This: [Item 1, Item 2, Item 100] instead of this…[Item 1, Item 100, Item 2].

The answer is to pass the sort function a comparator argument from the International Collator built into every major browser and Node.js. This approach is simple and declarative for lists of flat strings. The comparison function arguments default to each string being compared. For sorting objects such as a list of dropdown choices, just pass a pair of the sort field drill-downs to the comparison function.

State-Management-with-React-Recoil

React and Recoil for State Management

Alex Cassells Articles, JavaScript, Programming, React 1 Comment

In this blog, Iโ€™ll focus on one tool you might use for State Management, Recoil. First, weโ€™ll look at why State Management is an effective strategy in general. Then, weโ€™ll turn our attention to Recoil, and finally, weโ€™ll dive head first into a demo. By the end, you should have all the tools necessary to begin using Recoil on your own!

Jakt: A First Look

First Look: The Jakt Programming Language

Luke Zeisset Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming 1 Comment

There seems to be a renaissance in systems programming languages. Updates to C and C++ donโ€™t seem to get the attention of a lot of developers that arenโ€™t already interested in their development. In contrast, languages like Go, Rust, and Zig are hot topics that seem to do an excellent job recruiting people, nearly providing the level of accessibility that Python does.

A fairly new programming language appeared this year that strikes an intriguing balance between C++ and Rust. That language is Jakt, and Iโ€™d like to shine some light on it.