After we managed to set up our basic web application, let’s get our hands dirty writing some code. And as we want to do it in a test-driven manner (TDD), we need a proper test setup. This piece is all about our initial test pyramid. Test, what? Yes, pyramid: At the base of the test automation pyramid is unit testing. Unit testing should be the foundation of a solid test automation strategy and as such represents the largest part of the pyramid. Read more

Together with few friends we started building pace - a web application for organizing and managing running events & competitions. We are a colorful bunch of people with different backgrounds, therefore we wanted to choose an approachable tech stack, as some of us wants also to learn one or two things about JavaScript, web applications or programming in general. And then, somebody suggested to write one thing or two, about our technology decisions and accompany it with some HowTo information. Read more

During my last four projects or so, the teams I worked with were always using GO.CD as the CD tool of their choosing. Although the pipeline state visualisation GO.CD comes with is quite nice, it still doesn’t cut it as a proper, obvious build monitor enabling everybody in the team to quickly recognize what is the pipeline status. Burstah in action Therefore first cidar, a simple sinatra based build monitor, has been born. Read more

Last Thursday I was a part of the Scoopcamp hackathon and it was so great that I just couldn’t resist to write down some of my thoughts about it. Our team ThoughtWorks and friends a colorful mix of journalists, students and developers had a rough idea for a modern - more agile - journalism, where the journalist reporting about an ongoing event writes the background story and live updates from his perspective, but can also incorporate content written by the readers who create their own streams representing their own take on the particular event. Read more

Back in 2009 I became the job to design and start realizing a quite large web application for a health care research project. I took some time, sat down and thought about the technology stack, I would like to use to build it. As we wanted to have an RIA and I already had some experience with GWT, we quickly decided to use it. Since then four years have passed and we are about to release the 2.0 version of our system. During this time, the whole team learned a lot about GWT, its advantages and also some disadvantages, and I thought it would be useful to write some of them up. This part is about the status quo, in the second part I will try to write about a GWT setup I would go for, when starting the project today - so if you have any hints in this regard, please feel free to leave a comment, I would definitely appreciate it! Read more