Devon C. Estes

The Parable of Painting an Office

Today I'm taking a bit of a different track on what I'm writing about. Instead of something very technical, I'm going to talk about something completely non-technical - estimation. Estimation is one of those things that everybody wants, but nobody ever really gets, and this is something that can be really hard to explain to product folks, but I've used this example to explain our faults in estimation quite a lot, and so I wanted to actually write it down and share it with folks in case they could use it as well. »

Three Ways To Get Started With Mutation Testing

I've just pushed some significant functionality from Muzak Pro into Muzak, which means that it's even easier for folks to work some mutation testing into their workflow and start seeing the benefits! Today I'm going to break down three ways that you might want to get started with that. »

Three Classes of Problems Found by Mutation Testing

It's fairly common for folks who haven't used mutation testing previously to not immediately see the value in the practice. Mutation testing is, after all, still a fairly niche and under-used tool in the average software development team's toolbox. So today I'm going to show a few specific types of relatively common problems that mutation testing is great at finding for us (and that humans are notoriously bad at finding). »

Announcing Muzak and Muzak Pro

As of today, Muzak and Muzak Pro are live! If you follow me on twitter you may have seen some hints that I've been making some good progress recently on the mutation testing library that I've been working on for close to a year now, and I think things are in a good enough place to push up the first versions of both Muzak and Muzak Pro. »

Migrating to Elixir with the Strangler Pattern

I think it's fair to say that a good amount of folks - if not the majority of them - using Elixir in production today are doing so after migrating an application to Elixir from some other language instead of just building in Elixir from scratch. Of course this idea of re-writing an application is scary, and rightly so! But there are some ways to make this process simpler and less scary, and also to reduce the likelihood of introducing regressions during this process, and that's what I'm going to go over today. »