The future of testing is yellow

Pingdom, my favourite service for monitoring my servers, released a new tool yesterday that saves you from becoming a click monkey: Transaction Monitor.

What it does is accessing your webpage, clicking links, filling out forms and checking on the results (URL, Status Codes, etc.). I just implemented it for checking all of our stores checkout processes once a day.
Setting up is straigt forward and easy (as long as you have a check left in your Pingdom account). The Check editor offers context sensitive suggestions on actions and validations and has instant feedback on how long it took to perform the action and wether it was successful or not.
check-editor

So with the Transaction Monitor annyoing repetitive task can be automated and thanks to that performed even more often as when executed manually.

check

For some inexplicable reason however there is an artificial limit on the number of steps you can add to a check which is currently 25 and limits the usefulness unnecessarily.

Viel heiße Luft

Es gibt ja auch noch andere Shopbetreiber die bloggen. Und zumindest so tun, als würden sie der Community was zurückgeben.

Natürlich gilt es Chancengleichheit für alle Kollegen zu gewährleisten: wer die Präsentation ebenfalls haben möchte, schreibt mir einfach eine mail

Habe ich gemacht. Mehrmals. Und der Kollege auch. Reaktion: Keine. Auch Kommentare im ‘Blog’ werden ignoriert, indem sie einfach nicht freigeschaltet werden.

Da bleibt mir nur zu sagen: Put your money where your mouth is. Oder einfach keine leeren Versprechungen abgeben.

#btconf – Take 2

I was very exited to be part of beyond tellerrand 2012 and I didn’t get disappointed.

While the conference in 2011 was great, this year it was even greater. And I got a sneak peak on next years speakers and 2013 might be even greaterer. And there is another good news: We won’t have to wait a whole year this time as Marc switches the dates for Play! and Web and the later will take place in May 2013, 27th to 29th to be exact.

My fellow german colleagues often nickname Beyond Tellerrand as „Klassentreffen” (class reunion) for the german webworker scene and that exactly nails it. You can meet everybody in Düsseldorf and it was great to see Sandra, Eric, Christian, Marc and all the others again and meet new talented guys like Dennis and Andreas. Plus we had nice vegan food together.

Those who follow me on Twitter might have noticed that I didn’t tweet that much this time. And I barely took notes. This is because I was afraid to miss something from all these great talks. And all of them were fascinating, both those with more technical details and those without. So I won’t get into any details here, others have already done this and more will follow. Marc will most likely put a nice list of all posts on Lanyrd or somewhere else. Marc is collecting all write-ups on the conference’s lanyrd-page.

What I love most about this conference is most likely this familiar flair that’s everywhere. And this is most likely because of Marc. No matter how busy he might be, there is always time for a little chat or a beer. Thanks to this you don’t feel like just attending a conference but being part of it. Of course his team does also a tremendous job to run this so smoothly and a great thank you goes out to them, too.
The worst thing is that I’m in such a passive role. I’m just not used to it, I’m a maker in everything I do. You’ll for instance never see me in a baseball stadium just watching. So this is really hard for me. And I’ll have to change this one day.

Pictured above is BTW my brand new Wacom Bamboo Stylus which I ‘won’ at the conference. Thanks to Wacom for the Bamboo and thanks to Marc for throwing an orange one in my direction, as orange is my favorite color.