Yesterday, I attended a session, presented by Jonathan Smart, on the topic of “Better Value Sooner Safer Happier” which was based on his book “Sooner Safer Happier”. The author’s approach is based on Lean, Agile, and DevOps principles, which have been adopted by many organizations worldwide, but with a strong focus on outcome, not on any process like Scrum, DevOps or Scaled Agile. In this review, I will share my key takeaways, I will not share his full talk, you can read the book and find some videos online.

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My Goodreads 2022 reading list shows exactly 50 books this year. I did not break my record for the number of books (52, in 2017), but the amount of pages, 15.248, is definitely a record. Although reading is not about breaking records, spending time on a hobby is something that requires dedication and I am proud of my reading achievement. In this post, I will share my favorite, work-related books of 2022.

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Getting to the end of the year, you know it will be that time again: Advent of Code time! Starting on the first of December, up until Christmas, there will be a daily programming challenge. Last year I did an attempt to learn F#, which was not really successful. The combination of learning a new language and it being the first year I really participated in Advent of Code was just too much and after a few days I switched back to C#.

This year I wanted to skip it at all, but in November I decided to have a look at Rust and I got hooked. I looked for an IDE (more about that later), read a book and some documentation, did some of my favorite kata’s, and there it went wrong: I decided to solve some puzzles of Advent of Code 2021 and I decided to join this year’s edition again, with a goal: to learn Rust.

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There are a lot of static site generators around and I have been using quite a bunch of them. While I used most of them for this (personal) blog, I have also used some for professional purposes like documenting software and for team and company-wide documentation. Especially Sphinx has proven itself to be quite useful.

I want to create an environment with the following requirements:

  • Hosting in an Azure Web App
  • Protected by Azure Active Directory
  • Every project has it’s own documentation (no merge conflicts between teams)
  • Use Sphinx but using other generators is possible

In this post I will show how to create a documentation platform which implements the requirements above with only a few lines of code.

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It can be a challenge to implement new frameworks or tools in your daily life. Often it takes time to find out the quirks and best practices which can take time and even lead to doubts and abandoning frameworks. I have been using SpecFlow for a while now and I keep finding new ways to tackle issues and get cleaner code behind the specs (I am still having trouble creating clean & clear functional requirements though).

One of the things I keep bumbing into is using settings and sharing code between different specs. In the following example I will explain my latest find: using xUnit fixtures to get test settings and reusable api clients for multiple tests.

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Author's picture

Jacob Duijzer

A Software Engineer with a passion for quality, testing and sharing knowledge.

Software Engineer

Vught, Netherlands