I started working during my second university year (my first job was being a tester in Grisoft, which later became AVG, which later merged with Avast) and I was employed non-stop since then. I spent ten years with Red Hat, from where I moved to SAP Labs and had not taken any free time between the jobs. So when I decided to leave SAP Labs, the idea of taking few months off was irresistible. I did not have any clear idea of what I would like to achieve during the sabbatical. People often take a career break to pursue a specific project, to work on a dream project. I did not have any such goal. I knew I would like to reduce my book backlog, to live more healthy (exercise and sleep more), get the driving license and finally, do more for fun, open-source coding.

Python projects

I am already quite proficient in Python, so I went on to build some projects I had in my head for some time. The projects are not that technologically advanced, so I decided to intentionally try some new tools while working on them, and learn in the process. I am trying to use pytest for testing (along with some plugins) and mypy and Pylint for static analysis. I also connected few modern, cloudy, GitHub-connected tools to my repos to evaluate how they work - I tried Codacy, Code Climate, Codecov, Coveralls, Dependency CI/Tidelift and Travis CI. I like the direction where these tools are going, and I might write a post about them in the future.

Python Diff

This is a Python-based toy project that is supposed to compare two versions of a Python module (say, a part of a Git commit) and determine the syntactical/semantical difference between them. I do not have a clear idea about what exactly could the detected differences be, but I am starting with simple stuff like added/removed classes or methods and continue with detecting methods with changed API or just implementation, etc. The initial goal is to provide some machine-readable artifact describing the difference and then try to build further tools over them. Possible directions for this project might be a GitHub PR commenter bot posting human-readable summaries of changes (I could learn more about cloud services, GitHub API and natural language generation in the process), or combining the difference data with other sources like code coverage and perhaps some machine learning, and building a tool to predict “riskiness” of a Python project PR.

Of all my current project, I probably like Python Diff the best. After it moves a bit, I will do a separate post about it, and I will surely consider doing a talk about it on some Python conference.

VtES Game Log

In last autumn, I started playing Vampire: the Eternal Struggle (nearly dead, old-school, multiplayer CCG) again after a period of hiatus. I play using various decks against various players in various settings (friendlies in a pub, online, tournaments) so I decided to build a simple tool for tracking my games and results, going from a local, CLI-oriented utility to first an online REST API and then possibly a web application. The underlying data structures are trivial, so I would like to learn more about writing REST APIs (possibly experimenting with some API tools like Apiary, Dredd or 3scale) and running them on some cloud platform like AWS or Openshift.

Collaborations

After I finished in SAP, I let some of my friends know, we met and discussed some possible collaboration.

Engeto Testing Course

My former Red Hat colleague Filip founded an IT education startup where one of the things they do are courses. They do not have a course focused on software testing yet, so we agreed we would collaborate on creating one together. I was mostly researching on what content to include in the course until now. Now we finally have the research done, and we are following with an outline, and we will start producing the actual content soon.

Perun

Perun is a very interesting pet project of my former colleague of VeriFIT, Tomáš Fiedor. It is a long-term performance tracking/control system which attaches your project’s performance metrics (performance test results, profiling information and the like) to your Git revision tree, so you can track, analyze and visualize them over time, possibly spotting performance regressions as they happen during development. We had a nice talk with Tomáš about possible directions of this project, one of which was taking it into the cloud and making a Git/GitHub-connected web application (like Travis CI or Code Climate) out of it. Unfortunately, this was the one project for which I failed to allocate sufficient time :(

Books

Agile Testing

I have started reading this one in January already but had a hard time finishing it because it became quite tedious to read (it tends to be repetitive and vague). I managed to finish it in March, finally. It is starting to show its age because it focuses so much on managing situations where a tester’s company is not that friendly to Agile, transitioning from Waterfall or other non-ideal situations not that common today. I liked the Agile Testing Quadrant and the last part about how testers can contribute in different stages of an agile project.

Coders at Work

This is also a fatty (around 600 pages), but it reads well being in an interview format; at least for me, it does. I am currently somewhere in the middle. It does not give a reader any straight applicable material, but it is interesting to read because the interviewees have different achievements and backgrounds. I especially like to compare answers of different people to identical questions.

Misc

I was not doing just IT stuff. I finally obtained my driving license, which took quite a lot of time, although I managed to pass both exams on a first try. I also spent a lot of time on physiotherapy exercises to treat my jumper’s knee. It healed nicely, but it seems to be back after few football matches :(