Okay, I know you’re skeptical. Other guides have promised you painless web app tests only to reveal that their solution requires some hyper-specific tech stack or a paid third-party service. I won’t do that to you.

This guide provides a straightforward and flexible template for end-to-end tests that you can apply to almost any web app. The only requirement is that your app can run in Docker.

That’s really the only requirement! You can test a Ruby app, a React app, an Enterprise Java Beans app, or even some wacky web stack you invented. And it doesn’t matter if you’re developing on Windows, Linux, or Mac. Best of all, you don’t have to perform convoluted configuration or install any software beyond Docker.

Overview

This past weekend, PyTexas invited me to speak at their annual conference in Austin, Texas.

It was a fun trip, and I learned a lot. It was also expensive, both financially and in terms of time. I’m taking these notes partly to share what I learned and partly to help me decide whether the benefits I get from attending conferences outweigh the costs.

Favorite Talks

Intentional Deployment: Best Practices for Feature Flag Management

Speaker: Caitlin Rubin from Optimizely

Highlights

• Is It Keto’s visits reached a record high of 11k pageviews.
• Revenues reached a record high of $40.84 in affiliate income.
• Despite this, Is It Keto didn’t satisfy its critical goals, so I’m putting it on the backburner.

Goal grades

At the start of the month, I laid out some high-level goals. Because of Is It Keto’s slow growth, I declared these to be goals the site must meet or else I’d stop working on it.

Highlights

• Is It Keto’s user visits plateaued in February, but that still represents progress.
• Revenues fell substantially and missed targets for the month.
• I’m going to shelve the project unless I achieve my targets for March.

Goal grades

At the start of the month, I laid out some high-level goals. Here’s how I did against those goals.

Achieve $60 in revenue

• Result: Earned ~$11 in revenue (82% below target)
• Grade: D

Amazon Affiliate revenue continues to be bursty. A single purchase through one of my affiliate links can yield anywhere from $0.50 to $20. Revenues did not grow the way I hoped, and so I finished the month with a meager $11.

I’ve grown a lot over the last year at my job. Things are never really the same for long, and I’ve had a ton of different challenges to tackle – both on the technical side, but in a growing proportion on the side of people management and technical leadership, too. So I wanted to share some of the books I’ve loved over the last year, which I would recommend even to developers who aren’t currently managing people or projects.