You've applied for a job, maybe lots of jobs.

If you get the job, and you enjoy the work, awesome, congratulations.

If you don't get the job, it'd be really great to know why.

Sometimes it isn't because you aren't a skilled engineer.

What other reasons are there?

Well, that's what we're talking about today.

Charity Majors is the cofounder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, and we're going to talk about reasons for not hiring someone.

This is a very informative episode both for people who job hunt in the future and for hiring managers and people on the interview team.

Special Guest: Charity Majors.

Sponsored By:

• PyCharm Professional: Try PyCharm Pro with a 4 month free trial. Promo Code: TESTANDCODE22

Links:

• The (Real) 11 Reasons I Don’t Hire You — The article

Andy Knight is the Automation Panda.

Andy Knight is passionate about software testing, and shares his passion through public speaking, writing on automationpanda.com, teaching as an adjunct professor, and now also through writing a book and organizing a new regional Python conference.

Topics of this episode include:

Special Guest: Andy Knight.

Sponsored By:

• Raygun: Detect, diagnose, and destroy Python errors that are affecting your customers. With smart Python error monitoring software from Raygun.com, you can be alerted to issues affecting your users the second they happen.

Links:

• Automation Panda
• Andy's Speaking events
• PyCarolinas 2020

Cristian Medina wrote an article recently called "Test Engineering Anti-Patterns: Destroy Your Customer Satisfaction and Crater Your Quality By Using These 9 Easy Organizational Practices"

Of course, it's sarcastic, and aims to highlight many problems with organizational practices that reduce software quality.

The article doesn't go out of character, and only promotes the anti-patterns.

Here's the list of all the points discussed in the article and in this episode:

Special Guest: Cristian Medina.

Sponsored By:

• Azure Pipelines: Automate your builds and deployments with pipelines so you spend less time with the nuts and bolts and more time being creative. Many organizations and open source projects are using Azure Pipelines already. Get started for free at azure.com/pipelines

Links:

• Test Engineering Anti-Patterns: Destroy Your Customer Satisfaction and Crater Your Quality By Using These 9 Easy Organizational Practices — The article we discuss in the show.
• tryexceptpass — Cris's blog

Python 3.8.0 final is live and ready to download.

On todays episode, we're going to run through what's new, picking out the bits that I think are the most interesting and affect the most people, including

Not just the big stuff everyone's already talking about. But also some little things that will make programming Python even more fun and easy.

I'm excited about Python 3.8. And really, this episode is to my way to try to get you excited about it too.

Sponsored By:

• PyCharm Professional: Try PyCharm Pro with a 4 month free trial. Promo Code: TESTANDCODE22

Links:

• What’s New In Python 3.8 - at docs.python.org
• Download Python 3.8 at Python.org

pytest 5.2 was just released, and with it, a cool fun feature called dynamic scope fixtures. Anthony Sottile so tilly is one of the pytest core developers, so I thought it be fun to have Anthony describe this new feature for us.

We also talk about parametrized testing and really what is fixture scope and then what is dynamic scope.

Special Guest: Anthony Sottile.

Sponsored By:

• Raygun: Detect, diagnose, and destroy Python errors that are affecting your customers. With smart Python error monitoring software from Raygun.com, you can be alerted to issues affecting your users the second they happen.

Links:

• pytest changelog
• pytest fixtures
• dynamic scope fixtures
• episode 82: pytest - favorite features since 3.0
• the pytest book — Python Testing with pytest

Nicholas Tollervey is working toward better ways of teaching programming. His projects include the Mu Editor, PyperCard, and CodeGrades. Many of us talk about problems with software education. Nicholas is doing something about it.

Special Guest: Nicholas Tollervey.

Sponsored By:

• Azure Pipelines: Automate your builds and deployments with pipelines so you spend less time with the nuts and bolts and more time being creative. Many organizations and open source projects are using Azure Pipelines already. Get started for free at azure.com/pipelines

Links:

• Code With Mu — a simple Python editor for beginner programmers
• Made With Mu — A blog to celebrate projects that use the Mu Python code editor to create cool stuff.
• PyperCard — Easy GUIs for All
• CodeGrades

Tools like error monitoring, crash reporting, and performance monitoring are tools to help you create a better user experience and are fast becoming crucial tools for web development and site reliability. But really what are they? And when do you need them?

You've built a cool web app or service, and you want to make sure your customers have a great experience.

You know I advocate for utilizing automated tests so you find bugs before your customers do. However, fast development lifecycles, and quickly reacting to customer needs is a good thing, and we all know that complete testing is not possible. That's why I firmly believe that site monitoring tools like logging, crash reporting, performance monitoring, etc are awesome for maintaining and improving user experience.

John-Daniel Trask, JD, the CEO of Raygun, agreed to come on the show and let me ask all my questions about this whole field.

Special Guest: John-Daniel Trask.

Sponsored By:

• Raygun: Detect, diagnose, and destroy Python errors that are affecting your customers. With smart Python error monitoring software from Raygun.com, you can be alerted to issues affecting your users the second they happen.

There's a cool feature of pytest called parametrization.

It's actually a handful of features, and there are a few ways to approach it.

Super powerful, but something since there's a few approaches to it, a tad tricky to get the hang of.

Sponsored By:

• PyCharm Professional: Try PyCharm Pro with a 4 month free trial. Promo Code: TESTANDCODE22

Links:

• git branch — -a : list all branches, -r : just remotes
• pytest changelog
• pytest deprecations and removals
• Python Testing with pytest — Test function parametrization is in chapter 2. Fixture parametrization is in chapter 3.
• Parametrizing test functions — pytest documentation
• pytest fixtures — pytest documentation

You've incorporated software testing into your coding practices and know from experience that it helps you get your stuff done faster with less headache.

Awesome.

Now your colleagues want in on that super power and want to learn testing.

How do you help them?

That's where Josh Peak is. He's helping his team add testing to their workflow to boost their productivity.

That's what we're talking about today on Test & Code.

Josh walks us through 4 maxims of developing software tests that help grow your confidence and proficiency at test writing.

Special Guest: Josh Peak.

Sponsored By:

• Raygun: Detect, diagnose, and destroy Python errors that are affecting your customers. With smart Python error monitoring software from Raygun.com, you can be alerted to issues affecting your users the second they happen.

Links:

• From Zero to Test: Turning hurdles into steps.
• Advanced Python Testing — Posts
• pytest-vcr
• VCR.py
• pytest-randomly

Good software testing strategy is one of the best ways to save developer time and shorten software development delivery cycle time.

Software test suites grow from small quick suites at the beginning of a project to larger suites as we add tests, and the time to run the suites grows with it.

Fortunately, pytest has many tricks up it's sleave to help shorten those test suite times.

Niklas Meinzer is a software developer that recentely wrote an article on optimizing test suites. In this episode, I talk with Niklas about the optimization techniques discussed in the article and how they can apply to just about any project.

Special Guest: Niklas Meinzer.

Sponsored By:

• Azure Pipelines: Automate your builds and deployments with pipelines so you spend less time with the nuts and bolts and more time being creative. Many organizations and open source projects are using Azure Pipelines already. Get started for free at azure.com/pipelines

Links:

• Profiling and improving the runtime of a large pytest test suite | Niklas Meinzer