A Tasty Pixel » Testing

Announcing: Samplebot

Hello, friends!

I’ve finally emerged from the depths of coding – and, I might add, the joyous but rather engaging throes of new parenthood of a quite charming little boy! – to make an announcement.

No, it’s not what you think: Loopy Masterpiece Edition, now named Loopy Pro, is still a little ways off. But I have something to tide you over.

Samplebot: Beta test me!

It’s a new app! A taste of things to come, if you will. It shows off some of the features to come in Loopy Pro, but with a special focus of its very own.

It’s called Samplebot, it’s a sampler/sequencer, and I hope you’ll love it.

Now’s the part where you come in: I need your help, right now, to test it, stretch it, break it, find its weaknesses and crush them. Because this bad boy is coming out this month.

So, interested? If yeah, head on over to samplebotapp.com, pop your email in and tick the box, and let the robo-boogie begin.

Local Continuous Integration Setup With Git Post-Commit Hook Script

I have lots unit tests, but I don’t have a Continuous Integration server setup, and I sometimes forget my tests are there.

I know. Bad me. I was up late last night getting some failing unit tests to pass again, after forgetting I even had unit tests. Ugh. This would have been much easier if I knew I’d broken a test when I broke it; as it was, I had to go back and try to remember what I was working on when they broke!

So, to stop that happening in the future, I fiddled around with my local repository and whipped up a script that automatically runs tests in the background, on a separate temporary cloned version of the repository.

If build or tests fail, I get a nice little Notification Center message which I can click to see a report and build log. Then I can fix it and amend the commit as necessary.

It’s a script that’s invoked by a Post-Commit git hook, and it’s run in the background using nohup so it doesn’t make me wait and mess with my workflow. It just all happens transparently in the background.

Here’s how I did it.