May 2020 – Macinations

May 29, 2020

Affinity, thank you for the Lockdown 2020 sessions!

I wanted to give a massive thank you to Affinity for their Lockdown 2020 series. Each day this month they have offered a demo from a creative professional demonstrating their art, process, and method using one of the Affinity tools. It has been incredibly rewarding to see posters, advertising logos, sketches, and image processing come to life. There have been so many, "So that's how they do it!" moments. I've enjoyed every session and learned something new with each one. Even if the topic isn't your style of art or perhaps not even your product, the process and discussion make it worth watching. Again, thank you Affinity for putting together those session. The end of the month is fast approaching, but I hope you bring everyone back for another round of demos in the near future. By the way, bar code art, quite possibly the most intriguing and entertaining of them all, if I had to choose. 🙂

May 28, 2020

Using Taskpaper with DevonThink for Task Management

I purchased Taskpaper from one of the previous BundleHunt sales and have started using it more and more. My first attempts were simple checklists, marking off weekend chores, but I've started to dig a bit deeper into how it can help me. A recent addition to my workflow is to use Taskpaper to track my progress on Jira tickets. Starting in DevonThink, for tickets I work on, I create a new Taskpaper file. This is the ticket number with .taskpaper as the extension, such as xyz-1234.taskpaper. I'm very much trying to group documents in DevonThink these days. Inside Taskpaper, I copy any requirements from the ticket, then start making my own notes of what I tested and how I did it. I include information like user data, inventory SKUs, prices, quantities, etc. I also list acceptance criteria such as: Item price can't be above X Item can't be sold in region X Discount can't be higher than X For each […]

May 26, 2020

Automated Functional Testing

With a pretty solid framework in place, I'm starting to use my automation code for functional testing. I've been able to adapt completed test to accomplish specific goals. For example, I recently made a new test to add new products to our system. Each product has several options that can be configured. I was able to make a test to programmatically add several hundreds new items, in multiple configurations, and get the test done in a single day. Using what I already had, I was able to copy and paste 50% of the code as my base. I then used the standard commands already used to populate the form the way I needed. From my testing, it took me about 30 seconds to populate the form and click the different options. The code does it in 5 seconds. That is also 30 seconds at my best. If I were to have to sit there for 4 hours straight, not only […]

May 24, 2020

Integrating DevonAgent Pro with Alfred

DevonAgent Pro is one of the greatest search engine tools I’ve used and I want to integrate that power into Alfred. I want to use Alfred’s search bar to pick a search type and pass over the parameters. Turns out it’s not that hard, just not well documented. To make it all work, you need the following two commands: – x-devonagent://runPlugin?identifier=com.devon-technologies.images.plugin&query={query} – x-devonagent://runSearchSet?name=Deeper&query={query} The first command uses a DevonAgent Plugin to perform the search, the second uses a Search Set. To use these in Alfred, use the Web Search function under the Features tab. Enter the above command in the Search URL field. Also, select the option for Encode Spaces as %20. Now you can set up separate keywords to use different kinds of searches, which could be for images, deep dive searches, code searches, a specific engine, or anything else DevonAgent supports. To give a bit more of an explanation of the commands, we’ll start with Plugins. You can […]

May 23, 2020

The automation project continues to blossom

My automation project is coming along very nicely. While not a very good gauge of progress, lines of code is how I track what I'm doing. At this point, I have crossed over 3,000 lines of code mark. I'm not writing gibberish, as that doesn't help me. My goal is to write tests as quickly as possible, not necessarily as efficiently as possible. I'm not a dedicated automation engineer, so if I can't write, test, debug and complete the test in a single day, I'm painting myself into a corner. I take a piece of functionality and break it down. I have 4-5 hours to complete whatever it is I'm attempting. If it's not ready to be committed by the end of the day, I need to rethink what I'm doing. Either my task needs to be broken down further, or I'm trying to do something that is more complicated than it needs to be. I don't need to be […]

Affinity, thank you for the Lockdown 2020 sessions!

Using Taskpaper with DevonThink for Task Management

Automated Functional Testing

Integrating DevonAgent Pro with Alfred

The automation project continues to blossom

AdGuard Stats

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Favorite Games