Postgraduate Education

     

As the year winds down I’ve decided to apply to Oregon State University’s Online Master’s in Computer Science program. If accepted, I would start in the fall of 2025. There’s a number of reasons behind the decision. A graduate program would be a good way to brush up on the CS fundamentals that I picked up during my undergraduate. I’d also like to teach some day, either at the high school or collegiate level, and for that I need a masters degree.

Vibe Check

     

It’s been a pretty tumultuous month. Amidst work, contracting, family responsibilities, the election, and Intermediate Climb School I feel like I’ve been stretched pretty thin. I’ve also been struggling with what exactly to write. I didn’t want to get too far into the politics of what just happened because it’s been covered by far more competent people than me in a level of detail I couldn’t hope to match. Suffice it to say I hope this serves as the DNC’s wake-up call that the era of identity politics is dead and that we need to come up with a value proposition that the silent majority, not just the democratic base, can get behind.

Appium

     

I recently had to develop a test framework for a client. One of the requirements was that the tests had to be able to interact with elements outside of the app in order to provide a full “end-to-end” test suite. This alone ruled out native Espresso tests, which I had used in the past, because Espresso is only capable of interacting with views within the app. After a short stint of research I found Appium to be pretty much the industry standard for these kinds of tests.

2024 Resolution Check-In

     

I’ve been pretty busy lately, so I figured it would be a good time to do a new year’s resolution check-in. If you haven’t read my 2024 resolutions postyou can do so here, but to recap I had three primary goals: Update my Worldwide Equipment Guide app to use the new Odin API Climb three new mountains. Complete Intermediate Climbing School (ICS) That first goal is appearing like its increasingly less likely to happen this year.

The Squash Merge

     

I recently took up a contract job where the developers use the squash merge option in GitHub. According to GitHub’s documentation “When you select the Squash and merge option on a pull request on GitHub.com, the pull request’s commits are squashed into a single commit. Instead of seeing all of a contributor’s individual commits from a topic branch, the commits are combined into one commit and merged into the default branch.