Have you ever seen a Pull/Merge Request to a test like this ?

A typical time sensitive test. Time sensitive sets are pain — they are unstable, something slows down and the test fail randomly, you increase the sleep time and then you realize that the test is wasting time sleeping, you lower the sleep time and the tests starts failing again.

Alright, so there is a time-sensitive test. Although it is a bad practice for a number of reasons, I can accept that there are some “legal” time-sensitive tests. Typical case in my opinion is testing some expiration mechanism:

The DispatchedJobsWatcher class has...

I had a crazy idea for an app that does absolutely nothing useful, but I was so proud of it that I couldn’t just keep it hidden in GitHub. I wanted to share it with the world and let everyone experience how amazingly magnificently pointless it is.

So I became looking for deployment options. I have no problem with deploying an application, I do it as part of my everyday work. I have accounts on all of the Big Three (or was it Fantastic Four ?) — Azure, AWS, GCP. Given a Dockerfile setting up a deployment is a nobrainer. I...

That quote comes from Wikipedia and that is a very politically correct expression. In my vocabulary, hacking is exploiting some technology to do something that it was not intended for.

Streamlit is a framework for building data applications. Judging by the reviews it apparently works very well for that use case.

I’m not a data engineer and I do not develop data apps. I’m mostly developing back-end services — i.e. APIs, and I was interested how much Streamlit can be exploited to create an ordinary application with front end. It’s been some time since I created my last UI application (and it was in...

Enabling and enforcing SSL connection on MySQL is easy: Just generate the certificates and configure the server to require secure transport. And it’s even easier on the Azure Database for MySQL.

Just go to the Azure portal and enable “Enforce SSL connection” in the “Connection security” of the database server. Then, download the certificates and stuff them in your application. No problem — just two simple steps.

On a hackathon, we’d just download the certificate, put it in a random folder, and move on. In reality, we’re in a bit different situation then. We’d have three (so far) services connecting to the server...

In the first part of the article, I described how I automate the worker virtual machine setup using a Bash script. Now I’ll describe how to automate that Bash script using Azure Pipelines.

Having gone through the first part of the journey, I now have a Bash script which takes two environment variables — a token and a worker name — and sets up a new Azure pipeline worker. That’s cool but I still have to create the token, write the instructions how to run the script, store the script somewhere, run the script somewhere, etc. Still some room for automation and...

As part of our movement away from Travis CI to Azure Pipelines, I came across a repository which needs to run docker commands with swap limiting capabilities. It is included in our application which runs docker containers and is in fact an important feature enabling the application developer to specify some of the container limits. When testing, we’re also testing the memory limiting some docker containers, which understandably does not really work on Microsoft-Hosted Azure Pipelines agents. It does not allow such low level operations:

This is a two-part article. First, I’ll describe how to automate the worker...

I have an application which runs as a Kubernetes job. The application is implemented as a PHP Symfony console command, which is specified in the Dockerfile entrypoint:

When the image is built and the container starts, the PHP process runs a console command app:run. When the command terminates, the container terminates and the Kubernetes job finishes. So far, nothing special.

The next thing on my list was to implement termination of the job. This is actually trivial to do through kubectl (or the corresponding API):

That’s all. However, here comes the interesting part. The app:run command process spawns some...

Travis CI became a huge PITA last year. Basically, it randomly fails for hours or sometimes days. There are no status updates, no communication from support, etc. This is for another post.

Yesterday this hit me on a hugely legacy app, which has a pipeline split in 7 stages of building some docker images and executing over 350 functional tests. It’s a beast which takes slightly over an hour to build and unfortunately relies on Travis build cache which broke yesterday:

Looking at the pipeline — it is actually very simple, since most of the stuff is wrapped in test suites. So instead...

Having a lot of microservices means that writing a service client become a daily routine for me.

Writing a client for a REST API service is usually nothing too difficult. I strongly favor this over just ad-hoc calling some endpoints via Curl or Guzzle. The client can handle all error handling and retry logic and possibly other things (like API throttling). And mainly, it is fully tested. I usually write a few functional tests and then use mock tests to achieve 100% coverage. While there are many discussions about the benefits of 100% test coverage (I find this article)....

Recently PHPStorm 2020.3 was released with first class PHPStan support. Eager to try it I enabled it for a current project. The project is a bit of a pickle because it was put on hold a year ago. When resumed we had to start with rewriting half of the code and major refactoring. In the meantime I also boldly updated all the dependencies irrespective of any BC breaks.

This is how it looked:

212 errors — pretty bad for an application which was passing the max PHPStan level a year ago.

We’re using PHPStan from within composer.json like so:

This is a useful concept, because...