Posts

Showing posts from June, 2015

The geekiest goodbye message to a marching band that an outgoing senior could write!

Image
I marched in the band for all four years of high school, and anyone who does this obtains the right to compose a "Senior Will" that is supposed to call out special memories shared with friends, admit to any kind of silly activity or wrongdoing whose time is so far gone that the band directors would have a hard time punishing you, or to leave advice to the underclassmen of your section and the band in general. Looking back over my four years in marching band, I spent a great deal of time with many people -- especially those on the drumline.  We traveled together even more than the band did for contests, and always placed very well at them.  However, in reading several senior wills that told of interesting stories that happened among cliques or circles of friends outside our official time together, I realized... gee, I'm really such a freaking square!  I had a small number of very close friends in the band, and would say I had a great deal of notoriety and esteem among ev

A Day At Television City With Friends And Idols

The "G" in "GOSHtastic" stands for Game shows, so why I've had this blog for about two years and haven't posted this yet is beyond me.  It crossed my mind when the folks at work started seriously grasping my level of fandom, and I recalled an amazing recount written in an email to someone (in January '14, well after starting this blog, so D'Oh :-P) about my trip to see The Price is Right in 2007, in the final months before Bob Barker's retirement.  It was a sad day for fans everywhere when they found out it wasn't just a Halloween hoax that he was leaving the show, so we all scrambled to buy plane tickers and accommodations for a trip to Los Angeles.  At the time, I was a sophomore at Northwestern University. So, back in 2007... It was our spring break, and myself plus 21 others from Northwestern (mostly from the marching band or friends of members) were leaving cold, snowy Chicago to head to LA which wasn't exactly all that warm th

Help the suits write functional tests for Angular apps with Cucumber

You might call this Acceptance Test-Driven Development... No matter what the fate of the AngularJS Web development framework may be in the near future, the fact of the matter is it's here now and many enterprises have, surprisingly, began to adopt it.  As such, it is increasingly important to unify the set of tests that developers care about with the set of tests that business people care about (and that the QA automation team really likes to code the most).  This is hard because while the QA team can go on and write their own scripts to their heart's content, the business folks really can't do the same thing -- they lack the time and/or the technical inclination.  Thus, the automation team should be responsible for helping out the business folks by providing a "common language" (ideally, a specific subset of English words) so that everyone can describe tests for a system regardless of their know-how. What have I experienced so far in ATDD? Thus far, I am