our notebook

cypress automated testing: enabling safe and rapid development
John Bowser
august 3rd, 2023

Illustration of two developers working together to program a robot

Back in September 2020, our own Eric Wagoner wrote about his first experience with Cypress, touching on its ease of setup, easy to read and write syntax for JavaScript developers, and some of the team-related benefits of incorporating Cypress testing into a project. Since then, we’ve continued to work with several clients using Cypress - whether building out a testing infrastructure from scratch or helping them expand their tests and testing capability. We’ve learned a lot over the past few years working with Cypress and in this post, I’ll share some of the biggest benefits we noticed both from a QA and development perspective.

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The State of AI in Early 2023
Toby Deshane & Eric Wagoner
july 7th, 2023

During an internal company meeting in early 2023, Toby Deshane gave a talk about the capabilities and potential risks of AI tools such as ChatGPT and CoPilot, both quite new at the time. It also addresses common questions such as ethics, cost, privacy concerns, and the growing possibility of open-source alternatives. The rapidly evolving nature of the field has aged some material here, but in general it still provides a unique insight into this exciting nascent era in history.

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Meet Jeremy Tarver
Jeremy Tarver & Abby Zavos
october 28th, 2022

Jeremy Tarver, Picture source: Jeremy Tarver

Meet Jeremy Tarver, player of Native American stickball, river enthusiast, and underappreciated treehouse architect.

Name, Company, Title, City

Jeremy Tarver, Infinity Interactive, Senior Developer, Athens GA

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Meet Suzanne Raphael
Suzanne Raphael & Abby Zavos
august 5th, 2022

Suzanne Raphael, Picture source: Suzanne Raphael

Meet Suzanne Raphael, Infinity’s QA evangelist. A thinker, consultant, thinker, camper, thinker…. okay perhaps a bit of an overthinker, but the perfect kind of overthinker for QA and Infinity.

Name, Company, Title, City

Suzanne Raphael, Infinity Interactive, Lead QA/Consultant, Ossining, NY

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Meet Matt Holtz
Matt Holtz & Abby Zavos
june 17th, 2022

Matt Holtz, Picture source: Matt Holtz

Meet Matt Holtz, our Denver developer, dog lover, new dad, and the latest in our Infinity interview series.

Name, Company, Title, City

Matt Holtz, Infinity Interactive, Lead Consultant, Denver CO

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Meet Matt Patterson
Matt Patterson & Abby Zavos
february 18th, 2022

Matt Patterson, Picture source: Matt Patterson

Meet Matt Patterson (mattpatt), an Infinity developer, and an improviser in music and thought. A man who loves jazz, a good burger, and Larry David!

Name, Company, Title, City

Matt Patterson, Infinity Interactive, Junior Developer, Central Virginia

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Meet Trey Bianchini
Trey Bianchini, Abby Zavos, & Rob Kopf
november 19th, 2021

Trey Bianchini, Picture source: Trey Bianchini

Meet Trey Bianchini, Infinity developer who, in his spare time likes to make really good espresso and also, electric guitars.

Name, Company, Title, City

Trey Bianchini, Infinity Interactive, Programmer, Omaha, NE

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Meet John Bowser
John Bowser, Abby Zavos, & Rob Kopf
october 18th, 2021

John Bowser, Picture source: John Bowser

In this latest post in our interview series, we’d like to introduce you to our own John Bowser, programmer, nature lover, cat guy.

Name, Company, Title, City

John Bowser, Infinity Interactive, Junior Developer, Salt Lake City, UT

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automated browser testing: bridging the gap between dev and qa
Eric Wagoner
september 2nd, 2020

Picture of a robot typing on some sort of virtual computer

We recently were a part of a project with what was, in many ways, a typical successful startup. The company makes hardware for a niche market, powered by their own firmware and driven by a suite of web applications running both on a server and locally as Electron apps. They make a great product that is disrupting the space and they’re growing rapidly, both in company size and number of users.

What started as a small integrated team has spun up to several groups overseeing various aspects of the product and as that happened the developers became somewhat siloed from the QA folks. Each group had its own process for keeping the quality high in the face of rapid growth, namely thorough unit tests on the development side and a series of step-by-step documents used by a number of testers to manually go through every page and every button of the web applications. Releases were coming quickly and the testers were spending hours upon hours methodically testing only to have to start all over again when another release came out of development. They were overworked and almost overwhelmed, and called Infinity for help.

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free puppies, free tickets, & being smart
John SJ Anderson (@genehack)
june 18th, 2020

Picture of an alert looking, rather cute, black and brown dog, staring straight into the camera

Here at Infinity, one of our core precepts — coined by former Infin-ite Shawn Moore — is the notion that “tickets are free”. The idea is that you should never waste time wondering “should I make a ticket for this?” Instead, just make the damn ticket! In the immortal words of John Blutarsky, “it don’t cost nuthin’.”

With an opening paragraph like that, you’re probably expecting some sort of listicle of all the ways adopting our “tickets are free” credo will help make your software development efforts better and turbocharge your coders to new heights of productivity. That is not what you’re gonna get, however. Nope! Instead, I’m going to talk to you about how tickets are free… because they’re not free like beer, but instead are free like puppies. And then I’ll share ways to make sure your freely created tickets are usefully propelling your project forward, instead of bogging it down.

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