local-droid.com

Segmented control vs TabBar in Flutter

Mon, 19 Aug 2019 21:10:01 -0700

Here I offer a recipie. It is a little sample of how to make a control that shows up as a segmented control on iOS and a tab control in Android.

Why the masses haven't adopted BDD

Fri, 12 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Rick Barry used the “Granny Shot” to propel himself to seventh on the all-time list for free-throw shooting percentage, but when Shaquille O’Neal was asked to adopt Barry’s strategy as a way to lift his woeful performance at the free throw line, he famously rejected the notion.

“I’d rather shoot 0% than shoot underhand,” Shaq was reported to have said. “I’m too cool for that.”

Sometimes I feel like people say the same thing about Gherkin syntax and by extension behavior-driven-development (BDD).

Widget Communication in Flutter using Provider

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 21:24:51 -0700

I’ve been having some fun with Flutter lately and want to share a crude little example of how to use the Provider pattern for managing app state. What I like about the pattern is the straightforward nature with which it enables widgets to communicate with each other. Also, I like being able to tell the StatelessWidget to redraw itself rather than implementing those widgets as StatefulWidgets and saddling those UI elements with the added responsibility of tracking when to redraw.

Developing with Vagrant on a Mac

Thu, 13 Sep 2018 22:30:51 -0700

Using Vagrant for local development

Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I started using Vagrant for local development when I realized it was a waste of time configuring my code to be able to run on Mac. At the time I was beginning to build a continuous delivery pipeline in the AWS cloud. The CI servers I needed were going to run in a Linux-based environment and although most of the code was in Python, which lets you isolate things with virtual environments, there still is a need to interface with the operating system. Jumping through hoops on a Mac to get a few Python libraries to build successfully wasn’t always fun. Even less fun was navigating those same hoops once again because the system the code that now runs perfectly on a Mac, is a sea of red on Linux. At some point I figured it out. Who cares if the application runs on OSx? It is not a Mac app.

Buggy web app on vagrant in Debian 9

Sat, 27 Jan 2018 02:08:00 +0000

First (and probably only) version of buggy_web_app released to the Vagrant cloud. Get it. and get to work.

Provisioning Docker with salt masterless

Sat, 14 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Installing salt in a docker container and running it in masterless mode, allows you to use your existing salt infrastructure to provision containers. See the following Dockerfile.

Codebuild as short-lived container service

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

CodeBuild might not be the continuous integration server that everyone moves to in droves, especially as a standalone service, but I think there are use cases for it that exist outside of providing a test and build infrastructure. Short-lived compute instances.

Create REST endpoint with djangorestframework

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s use djangorestframework create a REST endpoint to register new users. We’ll assume you have already set up a virtual environment and it is activated. To install Django and some other things pip install a requirements.txt file that looks like this one, which is part of a working example on Github.

Dependency injection with RoboGuice

Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Back in the day, I could do my dependency injection the old fashioned way — through the constructor. But Robolectric versions above 2.0 put an end to all that. So I created a test project to prove the merits of dependency injection using RoboGuice and Robolectric 2.2.

Swapping Selenium::Webdriver for Appium::Driver in Rufus

Sat, 22 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the last post I described a method for speeding up the Rufus page object gem by parsing page source data rather than making extra calls to the Selenium::WebDriver. While those changes did speed things up, it just didn’t seem fast enough. Just a few months ago I had seen Frank run through cucumber tests with blazing speed. So I posed the following question to the google group for Appium and was happy to get a quick reply from some of its contributors.

Optimizing the Rufus Page Object Gem

Sat, 18 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

One of the issues my team has been encountering writing automated tests on iOS 7 with Rufus is the time it takes for Selenium::WebDriver to get a response back from the Appium server when running automated tests using cucumber.

Clean Kiwi Tests

Sat, 11 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the past year, I’ve really grown to appriciate testing an Android application using Robolectric. Looking at iOS, I would be satisfied to use the same technology on that platform. But alas there is not Roblectric for iOS. Enter Kiwi.