Over the past couple of months I have tried to push myself to be more involved in the tech community.
Hackathon
I attended my first hackathon at OPEN Glasgow. This is an interesting new initative tied with the future cities project which aims to promote the use of open data. It was the first of four events focusing specifically on public safety.
Over the weekend I worked with Kyle and Shaun on Sweeply. Our idea was a public services reporting tool through the use of exisiting social media.
While unfortunately not winning the event it was an enjoyable experience and we got some really positive feedback which was encouraging.
Talk
Continuing the momentum of trying new things, I gave my first talk at GlasgowJS. It was about preventing visual regressions through integration testing screenshots and subsequent image comparison.
Even with constant focus on implementing new features we still have to be mindful of introducing new bugs. It is especially easy when we are dealing with various browsers, devices and screen resolutions.
To have good faith in continuous integration we need something in addition to just our specs. By adding the screenshots of points in end to end testing to our repo we can know in advance of accepting a PR if one has changed. This means that if some CSS change has hidden a button on a particular resolution the reviewer will know and the branch can be fixed prior to being accepted and released.
Utilising image comparison software the reviewing process can be streamlined further.
There are a number of tools available for comparing screenshots with integration tests such as:
