The last blog post I wrote was over two years ago when I was deeply involved in automated testing for applications, mainly front-end JavaScript applications and Python APIs. A lot has happened since those last posts. At the time, I promised a series on automated testing and CICD best practices, and while I still wholeheartedly support these efforts, I feel a need to take a mental detour into thoughts on my current work and potentially revisit these topics in future posts.

So what’s changed?

Well, I work for a different company now, Adobe/Magento, and have a different title, DevOps.

It…

This is the beginning of a series on automated testing and CICD (continuous integration continuous deployment) practices, both for UI and API testing. I have been writing automated test suites and setting up CICD pipelines for a few years now at the company that employs me, Rackspace. In this series I want to share some of the tools that I use to automate testing and build CICD pipelines and show you how to get set up with the basics so that you can easily add automated testing to your projects and achieve true CICD.

But first, let’s get into the…

It’s no secret that being a faster developer will increase your productivity, but it will also improve your daily workflow when you gain better control and mastery over your tools. It even has some added health benefits — just say NO to carpal tunnel!

Most of the time, being faster means decreasing the amount of keystrokes it takes for you to complete a task.

A simple example: Using aliases on the command line. Would you rather type:git commit -m "Add cats to project" or gcm "Add cats to project"?

13 keystrokes in the first base command turns into 3 in…