I imagine many people who work in software development - or do it as a hobby - are familiar with the situation where they have to install, configure, and maintain a variety of tools. At work, for instance, our services are written in Go, but integration tests are written in Java. As a result, developers and test engineers can sometimes struggle to run each other's code. On top of that, there are numerous tools like database and api code generators, build systems with custom configurations, different versions of the languages themselves, a random nodejs in some of the microservices, and so on. None of this is an insurmountable obstacle, but these things can waste our time, be a source of frustration, or even stop us from getting things done.

There is another way. Recently, we've decided to try mise - a "tool to manage languages, env vars, and tasks per project."

Guess who played too much Life is Strange? 👀🙃 This is my new camera: Polaroid Flip.

I'm not an avid photographer, although I appreciate the medium. In Tallinn, we have at least two photography museums that I visit several times a year. I always find two or three captivating pictures I can connect with. It's difficult to describe, but probably everyone has had this feeling, when a photo or a painting suddenly seems very personal and intimate.

In the era of digital photography, this form of art became mundane.

TypeScript comes with a variety of built-in utility types. Two of them - Partial and Omit - can be particularly useful in API tests.

I changed its hostname to Cadillac.

I'm watching YouTube when I'm on a treadmill, and two channels dominate my playlist - Mentour Pilot and Disaster Breakdown. Both are dedicated to aviation incidents and accidents, explaining what happened and why. Even though I'm a nervous flyer, I find this kind of content rather soothing - it's the unknown that scares me the most.

Chloe from Disaster Breakdown released a great video yesterday. I watched it this morning, and even though it felt like a regular episode, little details quickly started adding up, until I asked myself: "Hold on a second, is this... [spoiler]?" Yep, she quietly dropped one of the best April 1 jokes I've seen! So I wanted to share it and recommend her channel.

Quality assurance consists of many activities, but often our primary goal is to verify and validate software our team is working on. Through various means we try to establish whether it fulfills customer requirements and other criteria like code quality, documentation, security, and so on. But who ensures that our job was done correctly? Even when we have a colleague who can review our test artifacts, they probably don't have enough time or context to do this thoroughly due to their own commitments.

Photo by Erik Mclean

This is why I always liked mutation testing as it aims to evaluate the quality of tests themselves. The idea is that we introduce small changes in the software under test and see if our tests managed to catch unexpected behavior by failing. We can, for instance, modify an SQL query from this:

select * from shopping_carts where user_id = ?

To this:

select * from shopping_carts where user_id != ?

So even though an insert method somewhere else would correctly add items to a shopping cart, it'll appear to be empty to the user due to the inverted where clause. If we don't have a test to validate the shopping cart after adding some items, all our tests will pass, revealing a gap in coverage. Like any other form of testing, mutation testing isn't exhaustive and it cannot prove the absence of bugs. Still, it can be a useful tool.

I saw this aircraft with a flight number 'TEST' a couple of days ago. It didn't go anywhere, it was probably technicians who were performing some routine checks on the ground. Still, I haven't posted here in a while, so I decided to share 😄

On my current project, I'm the sole test engineer in a team with several developers. We merge pull requests only when regression tests are implemented, so I sometimes find myself under pressure to handle multiple tasks at once - especially when there are failed tests. Without my input, it can be difficult to understand what a test is doing and what exactly is causing a failure: is it a bug or does a test need to be updated?

After reading many posts about AI in testing on softwaretestingweekly.com, I decided to give it a try and integrate Claude into our pipelines. The idea was to feed it test reports, grant it read-only access to the repository and the changes in a PR, and ask it to analyze everything and leave a comment with its findings.

Photo by cottonbro studio

One month later, here are my thoughts.

Art Of The Brick - a lego art exhibition - is currently taking place in Tallinn. Although I'm not a huge enthusiast myself, people create some incredible things out of these bricks, so I decided to check it out.

Yesterday I watched 2000 Meters to Andriivka in a movie theater, and I can't recommend it enough. It's a documentary film by Mstyslav Chernov - the creator of 20 Days in Mariupol - that depicts life and death on the frontline in Ukraine. Much of the footage was recorded with action cameras mounted on helmets, so what you see is as authentic as it gets.

I can't fathom where people find the courage and resilience to endure this.

Here is the trailer.

There is a great weechat script called prism.py. It assigns random colors to each letter in your message and sends it to the chat, making it look like a rainbow. I wanted something similar for Konversation, wchih I'm using on my personal laptop, so when I finally opened the documentation and saw that it supports scripting, I had no more excuses.

Here is the script.

We've all been through trainings at work where they tell us to pay attention to URLs and validate their authenticity, examine emails for red flags, not trust calls and messages asking for urgent action - and so on. A false sense of security can creep in: I should be able to recognize a scam. The last week's episode of Smashing Security, however, brought up an attack that is scarily easy to fall for.

Here's my brief summary:

• The attackers sent emails to hotels with a link to an infostealer.
• Once it was executed, they could access booking platforms on behalf of the hotels.
• The attackers contacted customers with urgent requests to update their credit card details - otherwise they'd lose their reservation.
• The link to update credit card details was illegitimate.

Unlike a regular phishing attack that we're all used to, this was performed through legitimate and - you'd think - safe channels. As the report says:

It is often recommended that customers use only official and known methods of communication, such as various messaging platforms within the site, to prevent illegitimate or scam interactions. Unfortunately, this great advice becomes moot now that the attacker can access those methods. <...> It is important to remember that this message comes from within the booking site’s message platform itself.

Honestly, I'm impressed - that's a rather sophisticated attack. Here you can read about it in detail, along with suggestions on how to protect yourself.

Stay safe and inform people around you!

I didn't know much about Tim Berners-Lee, other than that he invented the World Wide Web. Since my journey with computers started in the late 90s, when his creation had already exploded, it felt to me like something that had always been there. Besides, he wasn't exactly a household name. Thus, I wasn't particularly excited when I heard that Tim had published a book, but I made a mental note nonetheless. Good reviews from both the press and readers convinced me to order it.

I was working on my IRC bot recently when I stumbled upon a confusing problem while trying to add a graceful shutdown. The idea is that when a process receives a request to terminate itself (SIGTERM), it should send a QUIT command with some text, rather than disappearing like some barbarian.

Like this:

<= QUIT :bye
=> :poring-dev!~poring@user/poring QUIT :Quit: bye

Alas, the IRC server completely ignored my message, replacing it with a generic "Client Quit" text:

<= QUIT :bye
=> :poring-dev!~poring@user/poring QUIT :Client Quit

I spent about two hours trying different things and debugging my code to no avail. I knew the command I was sending was valid and that Libera Chat supported this feature.

What I didn't know is that there's apparently a type of spam attack that utilizes quit messages.

A film festival called PÖFF is taking place this November in Tallinn. It's a good opportunity to watch something that doesn't usually make it to the big screens - which are mostly reserved for Hollywood movies.

So yesterday I went to see Putnubiedēkļi (or Scarecrows in English). Even though it was filmed at Riga Airport, airplanes and air travel aren't the main focus of the movie. Instead, it shows the daily work of people whose job is to shoo away wild animals. Birds are probably the most dangerous intruders, as they can get sucked into engines, causing damage and expensive repairs. Losing one of the engines this close to the ground isn't ideal either. Other animals also like to visit the airport. Foxes can effortlessly jump over barbed wire fences, a beaver might decide to build a dam, and a family of hares can sneak in too!

Image source: https://poff.ee/en/film/scarecrows/

From my understanding, it was partly filmed by the workers themselves, but there are also beautiful cinematic scenes presumably shot by the film crew. It's really a "watch how we work" type of documentary. There are no interviews, no staged moments, nothing like that - just interesting, challenging, and funny moments from their everyday work. As passengers, we never really notice this battle with nature.

I really liked Scarecrows. The film isn't that long - about 90 minutes - and it has good pacing. Here's the trailer, although it only shows the cinematic segments.

I normally don't do advertising here, whether paid or as a favor. But my cat just got a website, and I couldn't say no: meowsiris.eu

It's a humble beginning - he doesn't know much HTML or CSS, but we all start somewhere. Check it out if you have time, there are some 🔥 photos!

I got myself a new mug!

I saw a meme on reddit with a mug like this and found it hilarious, because:

1. We use claude code at work.
2. It really does say "You're absolutely right!" almost every time.

So, I ordered one from kingitare.ee. They have an online editor where you can upload an image (including an svg!), choose a font, and preview how the product will look like - super convenient. The mug arrived three days after I placed the order.

I'm satisfied with the overall quality, though I haven't tested it in a dishwasher yet. I had a bad experience with an expensive mug from the official Arsenal store - it lost its print after a few cycles.

Happy vibing everyone!

When I got my new laptop two months ago, I needed to choose a Linux distro to install. Arch was my go-to for the last 15 years on desktops, but even though it usually works fine, breaking updates can happen. That's not what I wanted on a portable device I might need to take somewhere on short notice. Since Debian Trixie was about to be released, I decided to give it a try. After all, I'd been using Debian on servers for years, and it's always worked flawlessly.

https://www.debian.org/logos/

I recently took CS50's Introduction to Cybersecurity, an online course from Harvard University on edx.org. It's taught by David J. Malan, who never fails to deliver an energetic and engaging lecture. Over five weeks he covers some of the most important threats in the online world and explains what can be done to mitigate them. The main topics are:

• How to secure our accounts
• How to secure data
• How to secure systems
• How to secure software
• How to preserve privacy

I can really recommend this course to anyone even remotely interested in the subject. Bear in mind, it's an introduction to cybersecurity, so don't expect too much. But these lectures touch on a lot of topics that are good to know in this day and age.

The universe giveth and the universe taketh away.