June 21, 2022

The Least Intuitive Testing Rule I Follow, Conferences, and a Podcast

Greetings friend,

it’s been a while! Although a lot happened, little productive has come out of it for me sadly. But I promised that this newsletter is going to be low-volume, so there you are! That said, I have finally some things to announce now, so let’s get started.

Back To Conferencing

I attended my first real conferences since 2019: PyCon US & PyCon Italia! Since I just went through a COVID-19 infection at the end of March (on my first non-lockdown birthday, no less), it felt safe enough and unlike my co-worker I didn’t spend most of the time stuck in my hotel room after staying too long at a sponsor’s party.

I understand that in-person conferences are controversial and I fully understand when someone decides that their risk profile doesn’t allow for attending one. I went there with the full acceptance I might get it and I don’t recommend anyone to attend if you’re not cool with catching it. But for me, with three vaccinations and a mild infection a few weeks prior, the risks of Long COVID are far from the biggest risk of traveling around the world.

The Ballad of the Hole Puncher

However, you won’t see me attending any indoor events without a mask (FFP3 with a valve if there’s no mask mandate, FFP2 otherwise). The fact that everyone I know got their ’rona either at a sponsor party or going to bars with people who did get it at said party, is practical proof to me that an actually enforced mask mandate can make an event reasonably safe. Especially given that I had long hallway conversations with people who later tested positive.

Since nobody has managed to produce a study about mask-effectiveness in the context of a near-100% adhered mask mandate, this is the best we’ll get and I encourage you to up your mask game indoors.

Special shout-out to Ee who was running around with a hole puncher and if they caught you without a mask, you got a hole into your badge. Once you had three holes, your ticket was ✨transformed✨ into an online one.

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All that said, I can’t stress how amazing it was to see my friends again. There’s been many tears and emotions and having an FFP2 in front of your mouth changed nothing about it. What the lockdowns have shown me is how far away most of my friends live, and how much purpose I’m extracting for what I do for the community and from what is coming back. So thank you for listening, subscribing, and sponsoring. 💛

I hope dearly that it’s going to be safe for more people to gather next year – my arm is ready. 💉

Podcast Appearance: Test & Code #189

Against all odds, I made it on another podcast! Brian has been asking me to come on his Test & Code since at least 2017 and I kept saying “yes”, but somehow it never worked out.

Until now! On the occasion of import attrs, we gathered together and talked about attrs and dataclasses.

If you’ve been missing my obscure middle-european accent, want to check out my new audio setup, are interesting in learning more about attrs and my involvement with dataclasses, or just want to hear the soothing clicking of my fidget cube that I used to stay calm(er) – unaware it’s going to be in the recording: give it a listen!

Don’t Mock What You Don’t Own

Finally, as I’ve teased in the last newsletter, I got tricked into giving a lightning talk at PyCon Italia (the post uses Python for its terseness, but the concepts are universal), because I made a stupid joke on Twitter.

Turns out, that the topic is a bit complex for five minutes, but it went well, so I’ve decided to write it down into a blog post. If you’ve ever heard about Don’t Mock What You Don’t Own, but it made no sense to you, I hope this article will change that:

Don’t Mock What You Don’t Own in 5 Minutes¹

What’s interesting is that although I had all the content and research done, it took me a whole weekend to write it down and then some hours to edit it with feedback from my friends. Does this ever get easier?!

This blog post got a lot better than I expected, so if you’re interested in how to test real-world systems that don’t just consist of adding two numbers: enjoy!

Tidbits

TIL

Only one TIL! 😱 I’m sensing I’m starting to put too much pressure on the TILs too. Not sure how to deal with that.

It’s a nice one though: Parametrized pytest Fixtures

If you ever wondered how to elegantly re-use a pytest parametrizations or wanted to parametrize your fixtures, this one is for you!

FOSS

Mea culpa, new attrs and structlog releases are very much overdue, so only a few minor releases:

• prometheus-async 22.2.0
• environ-config 22.1.0
• doc2dash 2.4.1

Best,
—h