I've been talking about demoing the application to my head of department for a while now, but hadn't found the time until now. Work is busy, and I'm a procrastinator. The demo went pretty well, with the overall feedback being the application will be useful and is heading in the right direction already, with plenty... Continue Reading →
Configuration Viewer Tool R3: Templates and Packaging
There's two bits of progress to talk about this time around. Getting a template engine in place, and packaging the app up for distribution. Template Engine This was one of those occasions where I wasn't 100% sure what I was meant to be searching for when looking for libraries to accomplish my goal. I started... Continue Reading →
Configuration Viewer Tool: Progress Report 2
Configuration viewer development continues full steam, powered by my weekly caffeine hit. Data Persistence The config viewer now persists data through both refreshes and application shutdowns. This ended up being fairly easy to implement thanks to an electron specific library: electron-store. After npm installing and requiring the library, it was as simple as setting key/values... Continue Reading →
Configuration Viewer Tool: Progress Report 1
Progress on the configuration viewer test tool I described in my last post is going well so far. Electron is proving to be a great platform for quickly prototyping and developing this kind of tool. Because Electron is essentially a web browser, there's very little wasted time when making alterations to the code. So far... Continue Reading →
New Tool Time – Introduction
I've previously written about how important I believe testing tools to be, especially ones written in-house to solve issues that only your organisation faces. It's time to plan and develop a new one! This series of posts will be a development diary for this new tool. Hopefully it will provide insight into the kind of... Continue Reading →
Testing Tools Are the Most Valuable Things I Make
Tools are great. Tools can make you and your colleagues' work lives so much less tedious on a daily basis. Where I work we have various long, complex processes that are incredibly easy to get wrong and spend half an hour trying to figure out what the problem was. Was it step one? Step five? ... Continue Reading →