Frizzlefry Blog

Teaching Cloud Agents to Mirror GitLab (When They Only Speak GitHub)

2026-11-02T10:00:00.000-08:00

If you want a humbling lesson in the limits of cloud AI, try convincing an autonomous agent to acknowledge any version control system that isn't blessed by its creator. Over the past couple of days, thirty new suggestions rolled in from Google Jules across my personal repositories. Having an AI throw thirty suggestions at you before you even pour your morning coffee is a strange experience; it feels less like having an elite pair programmer and more like managing an over-eager intern who drank three Red Bulls and started refactoring everything in sight.

I've actually refined this process a little. See, I just click start on all of them, then rely on my local triage squad of agents to work through the pile. Out of thirty suggestions, they threw thirteen in the trash. Most of those rejected items were classic AI churn; cosmetic whitespace changes, duplicate lint passes, and redundant null checks that did not actually fix anything. But a handful of them genuinely mattered. They caught and patched real path traversal security vulnerabilities, some minor bug fixes, and cut two clean releases before dinner.

That seems great, until you see the exponential rise in Github Actions usage. So, the small taste of productivity put me into a strange situation; I eat through my entire free quota of Github actions in less than a week. The only real choice that gives me is to pay money or self host the pipeline. I spent the afternoon setting up a self-hosted GitLab pipeline on my homelab for Gas-Logger, complete with automated Gradle test runs, APK builds, and deployment hooks. Since Jules was already churning out code suggestions, I figured: why not point the agent directly at my self-hosted GitLab instance instead of keeping everything chained to GitHub? It took about five minutes of digging through the Jules documentation to realize that was never going to happen; the underlying bot source is fundamentally hardcoded to GitHub OAuth and repository IDs. The cloud agent literally refuses to leave GitHub.

Because the AI clings to GitHub like a security blanket, I had to build a chaperone. I wrote a Python daemon to run on my homelab server, polling GitHub for merged changes, release tags, and open branches, and mirroring them over to GitLab. Distributed systems immediately reminded me who is boss; the sync script developed an annoying race condition (because of course it did) where tasks marked themselves done before git had actually finished pushing the branch. I had to hunt down the timing bug and rebuild the sync routines across all three repositories so my local CI runners did not try to build phantom commits.

Everyone online keeps hyping the fantasy of AI agents writing entire applications from scratch while we sip drinks on a beach, but that has not been my reality at all. In practice, you spend half your day babysitting their vendor lock-in, hunting down stupid race conditions in custom mirror daemons, and filtering out forty percent of their output because it is pure noise. Having AI catch a real storage vulnerability is neat, but when tons of automated motion amounts to so much maintenance plumbing, you have to wonder where the busywork ends and the actual value begins. I suppose fixing the plumbing is still my job.

Later,
SteveO

28 Pull Requests Before Midnight (And Why My Cloud Agents Need a Chaperone)

2026-10-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

-- P.S. Thank you Nano Banana for the graphic, it emphasizes the issue in a strange way... more AI slop for the Internet!

There is a specific panic that hits at twenty minutes to midnight, when you casually click a few repository suggestions in Google Jules and realize a cloud agent has opened twenty-eight pull requests against your main branch. Having an AI hunt down security bugs while getting ready for bed sounds great; in reality, every single pull request instantly spun up a production GitHub Actions runner (which will chew through monthly CI minutes faster than anything else I know).

The fixes themselves were actually solid. Jules tore through three of my personal projects (NL-Nutrition, SuperBudget, and Gas-Logger) like there was no tomorrow. It patched path traversal holes in Gas-Logger across PRs; it closed an SQL injection risk (I think... who knows really) in NL-Nutrition; it locked down CORS origin rules in SuperBudget; and it migrated brittle date parsing to thread-safe DateTimeFormatter calls before expanding unit tests. Part of me was thrilled to see tedious cleanup handled in twenty minutes - the code was cleaner, test suites were fatter, and I only clicked a button and had paperclip agents push the code through a multi-agent (Antigravity, Claude, and Codex) until it was merged to... main?

The problem is that cloud agents do not pay your cloud bills. When Jules finishes a batch, its instinct is to aim straight for main; meaning my repositories started kicking off full integration suites and Docker builds all at once. Luckily, I built a local chaperone. My homelab server runs a daemon called jules-governor that wakes up every ten minutes, scans GitHub, and quietly re-targets open Jules PRs from main over to develop. That simple switch diverts the flood into lightweight test runs so GitHub Actions does not eat my lunch before breakfast; truly a lifesaver when letting autonomous bots roam free in your repositories.

This late-night circus capped off an already wild day of agent operations. Earlier that morning, my local homelab fleet was running its own patrol rounds. Across a three-node Proxmox cluster with twenty-one network hosts and ten active virtual machines, local agents like Aragorn, Frodo, and Gollum (yea, LoTR themed agent names :) audited backups and verified services. Meanwhile, my Home Assistant edge setup (which reports device telemetry to an analytics cloud platform for senior care) ran 1,799 unit and integration tests, alongside 73 UI test suites, against a local Home Assistant Green hub and simulated apartment. So, on paper, I have over 90% of the code tested end to end, but does that really mean any of this crap works?

Even with twenty-one healthy local agents and hundreds of completed Paperclip tasks under my belt, reality still taps you on the shoulder. By afternoon, two code-review tickets (where Mandos audits a worker teardown fix) sat frozen in blocked status; all because I had burned through my weekly Claude quota and had to wait for the counter to reset. I mean, what is the point of having an AI company if it grinds to a halt because of a quota? Building software with autonomous agents feels like magic when dozens of security fixes land in your lap before midnight; however, the uncomfortable truth is that half the engineering job now is building governors, branch routers, and rate-limit safety nets to keep your digital helpers from lighting your compute budget on fire.

Anyway, this rant doesn't have a real point. Just marveling at the way tons of work amounts to nothing in particular. Its almost like AI never crossed that bridge from busy work to delivering value. I guess that's my job?

Later,
SteveO

I Vibe Coded a Thing... It Was Fun

2026-10-29T11:32:13.338-07:00

If you read Part 2 of my agentic development series, you already met Sleepy Tom, Baking Martha, and the rest of the Virtual Villa residents (none of whom exist, which makes them very easy neighbors). This one is a quick side trip into how the thing actually got built.

There is a real adrenaline rush in telling an AI to do something, watching it go do it, and then fiddling around in the UI instead of solving the programming problem myself. Solving those problems is a different kind of challenge, and one I would miss if I couldn't do it regularly; however, for a couple of weeks it was oddly refreshing to just let the AI take the reins.

A lot of this I did by talking to Google Antigravity on my phone. I tried to keep my hands off the keyboard, and I didn't always manage it. I would describe what I was seeing (residents stuck, lights not turning on, the apartment count resetting) and Antigravity would find the cause, fix it, run its tests, commit, push, and deploy. Every time it wrote a file, its own tooling reminded it "Don't ask for permission" - and it mostly didn't. It even built the disposable Home Assistant VM on my Proxmox server with Terraform, and later logged into the host itself to snapshot and upgrade it whenever I asked. Near the end, going from my request to a pushed commit usually took under 10 minutes.

Everything runs on local IP addresses with no domain name, and the test VM rolls back to a snapshot, so breaking things was kind of the point. I think a sandbox like that is essential when you hand an AI the keys. That said, my idea of "isolated" was a little optimistic... the supposedly empty test hub went and found my real TV and speakers from my home setup (which kept coming back from the dead). Funny how AI will take the liberty of cloning parts of your real home assistant instance when you tell it to setup a new instance.

Every room in Virtual Villa has a fake Inovelli Red Series dimmer with presence sensing. At first they showed up in Home Assistant as generic MQTT devices, even after Antigravity copied my real switch's model and firmware details (straight out of my production Home Assistant, no less). So one morning I just asked whether they could be actual Z-Wave devices. Antigravity explained that Home Assistant labels a device by the integration that created it, and when I said yes, it wrote a mock Z-Wave server. It committed at 10:54, and by 11:11 Home Assistant believed it had 145 Z-Wave devices (144 dimmers across 24 apartments, plus the controller).

My job was playing product owner, and that started well before the Z-Wave work. I wrote the first three residents myself: Sleepy Tom, Antisocial Jim, and Active Jane (I called him Jack in Part 2; he hasn't complained, because he doesn't talk to anyone). Antigravity filled out the rest of the building with folks like Night Owl Arthur and Wellness Clara. I described their days in plain English: meals take 30 to 60 minutes, bathroom trips 1 to 10, and a trip out anywhere from 10 minutes to 8 hours. Motion turns the lights on just like the real switch, except in the bedroom; nobody wants the light coming on every time Sleepy Tom rolls over.

I also had it read the sun position from Home Assistant so the light sensors would feel real. In my head the bedroom and living room had big windows, the kitchen borrowed light from the living room, and the bathroom was a cave. Antigravity picked its own numbers (living room 100%, kitchen 70%, bedroom 60%, bathroom 8%)... not quite the apartment I pictured, but close enough for a test harness. Honestly, that was the fun of it: I spent my time picturing apartments instead of writing code, which is a nice break from the nitty gritty backend work I usually live in.

The whole point was verification. Another project I work on, a Home Assistant app that reports device changes to an analytics cloud platform for senior care, needed proof that when a simulated light turns on, Home Assistant sees it and the cloud hears about it. During development the tests could hit Home Assistant's local API all day long; the cloud is a different story. A QA tool is more of a cost center than a value add, so I budgeted one check per device per minute, and later cut that back to device adds, hub changes, an hourly sweep, and the Re-verify button.That 144-device stress test found a real limit, too. When devices went missing in the cloud, Antigravity blamed a container restart until I pushed back. Then it found a hard per-location device cap, so a few days later I cut the building to 16 apartments and 96 devices.

I really do think this is where software development is headed. With a team of agents, I can do the work of five or six people. I do have to admit something, though... on this one, Antigravity was grading its own homework. It ran its own tests, pushed straight to main, and no second model reviewed anything, which is not quite the picture I painted in Part 2. I did set up a Claude reviewer in Paperclip partway through, but I never pointed Virtual Villa at it; in hindsight, that is exactly what this project was missing.

The part that worries me is what this does to people early in their careers, which is what Part 3 was all about. If AI becomes a crutch, plenty of developers will ship code like this without knowing if it's any good. I haven't done a deep dive yet, but every task I gave it was focused on one small goal, so I fully expect duplicate logic everywhere (plenty of developers would call it AI garbage, and they might be right). It's fine for a throwaway QA tool - I am nearly positive it is not code I would want running in production.

Anyway, that's all for now. In a future post I want to dig into the performance and the code to see where the AI cut corners; until then, I'm going to keep tinkering.

Later,
SteveO

So, How is the Tesla Now? Part 3: Elon, Autopilot, Dealership Racket... And an Answer

2026-10-26T10:00:00.000-07:00

After rationing our final warranty miles and digging through the data in the first 2 parts; now its time to answer the big question of this series: after three years and two months with our 2023 Model Y, would I buy another Tesla right now?

I have to admit, over the past few years, Elon Musk has made me nervous. In 2023, when we decided we wanted to get an electric car, I started with the position of anything but a Tesla. My biggest hesitations was Elon Musk; this was still pre-D.O.G.E. so my concerns were more along the lines of digital consumer rights (when the car is software, the manufacturer has a lot more control after you buy the car thanks to DRM) and Tesla keeps a lot of control over the car through software after the sale. My fears hit home when Tesla changed the Autopilot features; if you bought a car before 2025, the included autopilot features were amazing, but now its a shell of what it used to be; we actually pay the monthly subscription for Full Self-Driving - do that didn't really impact me - however, it sets a dangerous precedent.

At the same time, driving the Odyssey lately proved that I never want to buy another gas car, and honestly, we are ready to get rid of having a gas car altogether. The situations where we actually want a vehicle that drives 500 or 600 miles without stopping can be counted on one hand in the past 3 years; its honestly more of a hassle to go to a gas station than its worth. However, what about Tesla's competition?

Once you commit to an EV, the question shifts to why I would pick a Tesla over another electric car, and to really determine that, you need to talk about features. First, nobody makes a feature to compete with Full Self-Driving - nobody in the US at least, China is a different story. I use FSD (Supervised) for 78% of my Tesla driving (according to my driving profile in the car), and on those drives I can pull a lever and let the car handle roughly 99% of the steering and braking; lucky for me, I am a professional back seat driver just like my mom, but whenever I do intervene, it is almost always over lane preferences rather than a close call. It still does dumb, annoying stuff all the time: it changes lanes without a good reason, exits the carpool lane too early or too late, and forces me to toggle between obnoxious driving profiles like Mad Max and Sloth because you can't just set a plain 65 mph cruise speed and tell it to pass slow cars.

Even with those quirks, I haven't found an equal for surface streets and highways combined. The closest features in the US are geofenced to specially mapped areas rather than a real universal end to end automated driving system. Even the Level 4 autonomous systems - you know Waymo - require detailed 3D mapping in small geofenced regions and call center workers to monitor and take control of the cars, so they aren't even at the level of Telsa's autopilot in practice; its just, the person in the car doesn't have to monitor and be ready to take over at all times - the call center employees do (fun smoke and mirrors game though). I know the driver still has to monitor Tesla FSD in privately owned vehicles at all times and be ready to take over, but in practice its more like Tesla didn't get regulator approval to remove the warning outside of a couple small geofenced areas. So, it is level 4 in those geofenced areas, and level 2 everywhere else.

Two other practical advantages still hold weight for me too. First, while some base EVs like the Ford Mustang Mach-E are cheaper than a base Model Y; when I cross-shopped legacy automakers like Ford, Hyundai, Honda, and VW, many conveniences that come standard on a base Model Y trim still require stepping up to the top trim packages. This means the $35,000 Model Y should be compared to the $80,000 competition. Second, there is the buying experience itself. When you buy a Tesla, you just open the app on your phone, order what you want, and pay what it costs without sitting in a dealership back room while a salesperson pressures you into add-ons; I still don't know why buying a car isn't like that everywhere.

So my final verdict is an honest, slightly conflicted yes: I still worry about what software changes Elon might push down the road, and I wish every automaker sold cars directly in an app; yet I would still buy another Tesla today. Integrations into Home Assistant are a big selling point for me, FSD has been amazing, performance is wonderful, and the total cost of ownership can't be beat. I do hope there will be competition for Tesla some day, but I don't see that even existing in a number of way right now.

On a slightly different note, I will probably have a follow-up soon after we see what our $500 inspection turns up. Maybe it will be nothing and I'll be out $500 bucks, or maybe it will find some huge issue we didn't know we should fix! Either way, the past few years speak for themselves.

Later,

SteveO

So, How is the Tesla Now? Part 2: The Telemetry Truth

2026-10-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to Part 2 of my 3-part retrospective on approaching 50,000 miles in our 2023 Tesla Model Y. In Part 1, I covered rationing our final 137.2 warranty miles before a $500 inspection and the painful rev-lag of driving our Honda Odyssey all week; today, we are digging into my Home Assistant and TeslaMate telemetry before Part 3 wraps up with Full Self-Driving, Elon Musk, and whether I would buy another Tesla right now. I am pretty sure I will have more to say about this after the inspection is done, but as I'm trying this format of writing a bunch of posts and scheduling them to be published, I haven't dropped it of yet, so tune back in next week for that part.

Anyway... back in August 2023 (at 1,014.5 miles), I spun up TeslaMate alongside Home Assistant to log every drive locally. There is a side quest there about the drama around the original developer of TeslaMate leaving the project and having to spin up a separate docker container and database to host it outside of home assistant; however, I'm not getting into that here (maybe that will be a future topic). So, across 6,838 drives and 48,848 tracked miles, I collected some data!

In that time, the car pulled 20,833.4 kWh from the wall (18,546.0 kWh into the battery after 11% charging overhead), averaging 427 Wh/mi wall-to-wheel (380 Wh/mi driving). Even after Puget Sound Energy raised rates from 13.88 cents to (15... 18...) 21.66 cents per kWh (the 3 biggest increases in electricity rates in their history!), our entire 3.5-year electricity total is $3,249.22; working out to 7.6 cents per mile at home (86.9% of our charging) and 8.4 cents per mile if you include the $849 spent at superchargers across the country. Battery degradation stayed boringly flat too, easing from 278.7 rated miles new to around 260 to 266.8 miles today (just 4.3% to 6.5% loss).

Meanwhile, our 2018 Honda Odyssey usage completely collapsed. Before the Tesla arrived, the Odyssey averaged 1,068 miles per month at 19.3 MPG (costing 22 to 23.9 cents per mile). Once the Model Y took over at 1,289 miles per month, the minivan dropped 74% to just 276 miles per month. Driving those Tesla miles in the Odyssey would have burned 2,531 gallons for $11,023.14 - meaning the Model Y saved us $7,233.60 in fuel and kept 22.4 metric tons of CO2 out of the air (even more if you add in the costs for oil changes).

In the winter, the Model Y AWD is a beast in the snow. We logged 30 ski trips (4,390 miles) up to Stevens Pass down to 13.9 F without needing a Supercharger on a full home charge. Around 35,000 miles, we swapped the factory tires (Pirelli Scorpion MS) at Costco for EV-optimized tires (Bridgestone Turanza EV) before ski season; they are quieter than both the factory tires and the Odyssey's tires (Michelin CrossClimate2), though the Bridgestone tires seem to have traded away about 14% in range (moving winter consumption from 404 Wh/mi to 467 Wh/mi).

For longer trips, we can drive non-stop from Seattle to Vancouver, BC on a 100% charge and arrive with nearly 42% left. Enough to get us around Vancouver for the day before topping off at one of the local superchargers (those BC superchargers are even cheaper than charging at home FYI). Last summer, when a ferry issue forced us south through Olympia and Aberdeen to camp at Bogachiel State Park (575 miles with a roof rack and ski box full of camp gear and four bikes on the hitch rack), I plugged into the Forks Supercharger past midnight while the kids slept; recharging from 27% to 78% and decompressing before pitching the tent at 1:00 AM (while a shorter 337-mile Fort Flagler camping trip only needed a very short public charging stop to top off). Even the scary 12V battery error we saw in Worthington, Minnesota during our 5,531-mile winter trip to Michigan was just a quirk from using a bad CCS charging adapter at a third-party station... and Lynnwood Tesla Service checked on it and found nothing wrong, but gave me a Model S loaner overnight.

The telemetry is hard to argue with; gas cars can't even compete. I have also found most of the fear mongering is just plain false (waiting forever to charge, eating tires, range anxiety - which we did have that with Renmin's old Nissan Leaf 12 years ago - all that is just noise now.) Even the Insurance issue, which was a real problem when we first got our Tesla (Progressive doubled our insurance twice!) but now we found out that some insurance companies were just milking the hype to make a quick buck - we pay the same rate now we did before the Tesla.

So, I'm pretty sure I went way over 500 words here. So tune in next week for Part 3, we need to talk about Elon Musk's software changes, Full Self-Driving's personality quirks, and my final buying verdict.

Later,

SteveO

So, How is the Tesla Now? Part 1: 50,000 Miles in...

2026-10-22T10:00:00.000-07:00

So, I am trying this new format. I have had some time to think, and I kept writing these massive walls of text; then I thought, ok, I'm sure everyone loves reading massive walls of text, but hear me out. What if the wall of text had a 500-ish word limit? So, I tried that over the weekend, and I'm scheduling posts for 10AM each day. I don't know how well this works, but I'm trying it.

That being said, this post is Part 1 of a 3-part series following up on my 2023 Electrified Road Trip posts and The Test Trip V1 after three and a half years with our 2023 Tesla Model Y. It will take three posts to reach my final verdict in Part 3, because while this is easily the most fun vehicle I have ever owned, a few things over the past couple of years have left me genuinely conflicted. Today in Part 1, we are starting with why I suddenly parked the Tesla for a week right before hitting 50,000 miles; in Part 2, I will pull our real-world cost and trip telemetry out of Home Assistant and TeslaMate; and in Part 3, we will tackle Full Self-Driving, dealership games, and whether I would actually buy another Tesla today.

Right now, the odometer in my TeslaMate dashboard sits at 49,862.8 miles; meaning I have exactly 137.2 miles left before the 50,000-mile basic factory warranty expires. After reading a couple of articles about Tesla owners who scheduled a detailed service inspection right before their warranty cutoff and caught multi-thousand-dollar suspension or hardware repairs while Tesla still had to foot the bill, we booked the $500 comprehensive inspection.

Booking that appointment created a funny logistical problem: with under 200 miles of buffer left before our service date, we had to park the Model Y for the week so we wouldn't cross 50,000 miles early. Normally, my daily routine is dead simple. I set the charge limit to 60% and plug the car into our charger every night just like charging a cell phone. Daily school runs and local errands only drain the battery down to 55% or 50% (honestly, I could charge it on Sunday night and coast through the entire workweek without touching the cord, yet plugging it in nightly became an easy habit).

To save those final 137.2 miles, we went cold turkey this past week and drove our 2018 Honda Odyssey everywhere - and boy, was that a rude awakening. Before the Model Y, I always drove a minivan (Chevy Astro, Pontiac Montana, Honda Odyssey) or a 2008 Honda Accord, so the Tesla was already the sportiest car I had ever owned by a long shot. When you drive a gas car every day, you never notice the delay; however, once your brain gets wired for an electric motor that moves the exact instant your foot touches the pedal, going back to a gas engine feels sluggish. You press the gas pedal in the Odyssey and wait a full eternity while the engine revs up and decides whether it actually wants to move the van. Any electric car will spoil you this way... and it makes me never want to drive a gas car again.

Parking the Tesla also highlighted how differently the two vehicles handle maintenance and recalls. Over the past three and a half years, our Honda Odyssey has had eight separate factory recalls; every single one meant dropping the van off at the dealership overnight (or for two full days while we juggled family rides). By contrast, nearly every recall on the Tesla was an over-the-air software update that fixed the car in my driveway while I was asleep.

Ironically, we did just get our very first physical hardware recall on the Tesla to replace the headlights. Just like an active Honda recall where we couldn't get the part, the replacement Tesla headlights are currently on back order; which makes me wonder what would happen if my headlights actually burned out tomorrow (would I just be stuck with a car I can't drive after dark... during a time of year with 4 hours of daylight per day?!??).

Anyway... while the Model Y sits parked in the driveway saving its final warranty miles, Part 2 will open up my Home Assistant and TeslaMate database to see what 20,833 kWh actually cost us, how badly the Odyssey's usage collapsed, and how the car handled 30 mountain ski trips - all building toward my Part 3 verdict.

Later,

SteveO

Part 3: From Xbox and Windows 95 to Today: Who Trains the Next Senior Engineer?

2026-10-21T10:00:00.000-07:00

This is Part 3 (the final installment) of my trilogy on agentic software development. In Part 1, we looked at the clash between slow corporate code reviews and live voice-driven prototyping; in Part 2, I walked through how I run a multi-agent team at home with FCI Operations and my Virtual Villa simulator. Now it is time to connect those dots and get to the final point I promised back in Part 1 - why this amazing new workflow leaves me genuinely conflicted about the future of our industry.

In Part 2, I mentioned how running a multi-agent engineering pipeline changed the way I write requirements; specifically, how often I come up with performance requirements on the fly while actually using the software and realizing, "Hey, this button should not take this long to respond."

We love to pretend in software engineering that we can sit down before writing a line of code and declare a blanket non-functional requirement like, "All UI interactions must complete within 500 milliseconds." That sounds wonderful in theory, but in practice, it falls apart the second your software meets unpredictable hardware.

This is something I learned early on during my time at Microsoft working on Xbox 360. On a console, Microsoft has strict Technical Certification Requirements (TCRs). When a player launches a game or presses a button, the game has a hard time limit (down to the second) to display something on screen (even if it is just a spinning wheel or a loading bar) so the user knows the system didn't freeze. On an Xbox, enforcing that rule makes complete sense because every single customer is running the exact same hardware in their living room.

Desktop and web software is a completely different animal. You have no idea if your user is running a high-end gaming rig or some $99 Walmart cheapo PC that barely boots the browser. The same unpredictability applies to the cloud backend too; you don't know if a request is hitting a warm Kubernetes pod or a serverless AWS Lambda function that just went into a cold reload - surprise, your half-second budget is already gone. Because of that, real performance tuning usually happens in the middle of testing a working prototype, when you feel the lag yourself and tell the agent to fix the bottleneck.

However, watching how easy it is to let agents handle that heavy lifting brings me full circle to my biggest worry for our industry. Right now, a lot of developer burnout is coming from engineers trapped between two worlds: trying to satisfy slow, pre-AI corporate review processes while simultaneously being pushed to adopt high-speed agentic workflows.

As the agentic model wins out, we are heading toward a world where one senior engineer leading a team of AI agents can comfortably do the work that used to take five or more developers. I love the velocity in my own homelab, yet I can't shake the obvious question: where do the next senior engineers come from?

Think about how operating systems evolved over the last thirty years. Back in the Windows 95 era, you only had a tiny sliver of RAM and CPU, so engineers had to be incredibly disciplined and sparing with every megabyte. Today, a modern OS like Windows 11 will happily eat a gigabyte of RAM without a second thought, and then chew up another gigabyte just to draw the graphical user interface so you can finally run an application on top of it. Now, there are valid reasons for modern OS features, and I am certainly not arguing that we all need to go back to Windows XP here; however, cheap hardware made us lazy about resource discipline.

I worry we are about to treat software engineering talent the exact same way. Right now, it is very tempting to just let the agents do everything because you can move so much faster when you don't have three humans staring at every line of AI-generated code. If the function does what it needs to do, the performance feels good enough, and a security auditing agent says the security is good enough, we ship it. Yet writing those routine tickets, breaking things, and debugging the mess is how junior developers learn what good code actually looks like. If nobody is doing the foundational work anymore, in ten years, who is going to have the deep systems knowledge required to review what the agents are building?

Anyway... that is the full circle of my rant on agentic development. I am having a blast building with these tools, even if I am a little nervous about where the industry ladder goes next.

Later,

SteveO

Part 2: Sleepy Tom, Baking Martha, and My Multi-Agent Homelab

2026-10-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

Welcome back to Part 2 of my 3-part series on agentic software development. In Part 1, I vented a little about how painfully slow traditional corporate code-review queues feel once you have seen real-time, voice-driven AI prototyping in action. Today, I want to show you what happened when I took that rapid-iteration philosophy and built my own multi-agent engineering pipeline at home; before we bring everything full circle in Part 3 to ask what this massive jump in solo productivity actually means for the future of software engineers.

That homelab experiment turned into FCI Operations, a "Paperclip company" I created that combines local AI inference (using Hermes Agent and local models on vLLM) with frontier models like Google Antigravity, Claude, and Codex. Instead of having three humans stare at every pull request, I set up a pipeline where specialized agents write the code, build the test harnesses, and review each other's pull requests before I ever step in as the final human quality gate on `main`. I even have local agents that dispatch tasks to managed cloud agents like Google Jules, wait for Jules to open a pull request, review the diff, and approve the merge so the CI/CD pipeline can take over - all while I am off doing something else.

Of course, if you are going to let AI agents write and review code at high speed, you can't rely on wishful thinking to know if the software actually works; you need serious automated verification (otherwise you are just generating bugs at the speed of light). In my case, I was building and testing an integration tying Home Assistant into an analytics cloud platform for senior care, and I hit 95% code coverage by building an end-to-end simulation engine called the **Virtual Villa** harness.

The idea behind Virtual Villa was simple: Home Assistant thinks it is talking to a house full of real physical Z-Wave motion sensors, contact switches, and smart plugs, and the cloud platform thinks it is monitoring a real building. In reality, the whole thing is a simulated retirement community populated by synthetic resident personas that I created.

Each resident has their own daily routine and quirks:

Sleepy Tom, who sleeps in late and moves at a glacial pace.
Active Jane, who is up at the crack of dawn and out the door on a strict schedule.
Antisocial Jack, who mostly stays holed up in his living room all day (honestly, I can relate on some weekends).
Baking Martha, who spends practically her entire day moving around the kitchen.

Having these virtual residents wander around their simulated homes (with a little randomization around activities) gives the system a baseline of daily human activity. Once that baseline is established, I can start injecting anomalies. For example, what happens if Active Jane doesn't get out of bed at 8:00 AM one morning? The harness lets me simulate that exact scenario end-to-end, feed the telemetry stream into the cloud analytics engine, and automatically verify whether the right alerts get triggered and sent to the right caregivers.

Most of that simulation code, along with the unit and integration tests validating it, was written, reviewed, and refined by agents working in a loop. My role shifted from typing boilerplate to acting as the product owner and system architect; I use the tool, spot where the behavior or speed feels off, and set the requirements for the next pass. I watch the system resources, and tell the agent when it is using too much memory or CPU. Agents monitor the logs daily for error messages, and report to me with suggested next steps.

Coming Up in Part 3 (The Conclusion): I have to admit, part of me feels like a wizard running a five-person engineering team out of my home office; however, the other part of me sees a huge warning sign in how this works. Discovering performance requirements on the fly exposed a classic trap I remember from my days testing games at Microsoft, and it points directly to the final conclusion of this series: if agents are writing and reviewing all the code, who is training the next generation of senior engineers? Let's wrap up the trilogy in Part 3.

Later,

SteveO

Part 1: Move Fast and... Wait for Reviewers?

2026-10-19T10:00:00.000-07:00

I am back, after... years. Trying some new formats, but today I am starting with a bit of a rant... I am going to schedule some follow up posts that hopefully have a more balanced feel than my original 2,000 word wall of text I wrote over the weekend, and this is a not-so-quick heads-up: this post is part of a 3-part series about where I think AI-assisted software engineering is actually taking us. This is one of those love/hate topics for any developer, and its hard to know where all of this lands. So, as promised, I will start today with a rant. Its about the frustrating disconnect inside modern corporate engineering teams, then detour through my own multi-agent homelab tomorrow, and finally arrive at the big question in Part 3: when AI agents make one senior engineer as productive as a five-person team, where the heck do the next senior engineers come from?

So, over the past several months, I have been watching a pretty fascinating contradiction play out across the software industry. On one hand, executives everywhere are handing down mandates to push the envelope with AI and crank up development velocity. Everyone wants to get back to that classic tech ideal of moving fast and breaking things - just without the part where anything actually breaks. On the other hand, those exact same organizations are clinging for dear life to pre-AI "Human in the Loop" bureaucracy; meaning an engineer uses AI to generate a fix in ten minutes, and then the ticket sits in a queue waiting for two human code reviewers to sign off before it can ever be closed.

If you stop and do the math on a four-person engineering team, requiring the author plus two peer reviewers on every single AI-assisted ticket means three out of four people on the team are tied up touching the exact same unit of work (which is a hilarious way to define "high velocity"). Those two ideas are completely antithetical to each other. There is a massive disconnect between the way corporate leadership dreams things will get done with AI and the actual rules they enforce on the ground.

Right now, the traditional enterprise loop still looks painfully familiar: write some code, read some code, review some code, review it some more, run a few tests, and then answer a long thread of inquiries about why a function was written a certain way. All of this happens before the change is ever deployed to a proper staging environment where someone can actually click around and use it; literally adding days of overhead to a change that took minutes to write.

A while back, I got a front-row seat to a completely different way of working while collaborating with my friend David. Watching the way he works with AI was a real lightbulb moment for me. Instead of treating AI like a slightly faster autocomplete inside an IDE, he literally talks to the AI (with his voice) to spin up a working prototype, and immediately deploys that prototype to an internal staging environment.

From there, the real magic happens while we are actually using the tool. In real time, while we are testing the workflow from an end-user perspective and running into flaws, he just speaks to the AI. He tells it the exact problem we are seeing, explains why it is a problem, and contrasts what the app is currently doing against how he expects it to behave. While we are still sitting there testing, the AI updates the logic and redeploys the fix on the fly - no three-day pull request thread required.

Sure, new bugs pop up as we push the prototype further; that is just the nature of software development (and honestly, half the fun). However, by working in that tight voice-to-staging loop, the development agent stops being a fancy text generator and becomes an actual engineering partner. You iterate rapidly until the product meets the functional requirements and the spirit of what the user actually needs, and then you can circle back to optimize the code afterward; or better yet, hand it off to a separate, adversarial AI review agent to audit test coverage and suggest improvements before anything merges to `main`.

Coming Up in Part 2: Watching my friend David work that fast left me slightly obsessed. If voice-driven rapid prototyping works that well with one developer and a staging server, what happens when you build an entire multi-agent engineering organization around that philosophy at home? Next time, I will introduce you to FCI Operations, my Virtual Villa retirement community simulator, and how I put a crew of AI agents to work in my homelab (which sets up the bigger industry problem we will tackle in Part 3).

Later,

SteveO

The Test Trip V1

2023-10-23T12:16:00.005-07:00

Over the past couple of months, we have been getting used to mostly driving an electric car. It has become clear that our daily driving needs are more than met by having a Tesla and charging at home over night. Our normal daily activity can actually be exceeded with a 110v 15 A mobile charger, but having a 220v 48A wall connector gives us flexibility to guarantee we can fully charge a completely drained battery over night. So, at this point, I am trying to put myself into a situation where I need to charge; technically, I didn't really do that yet, but I was a little nervous testing the limits of the battery while taking my family through a mountain pass with occasional drops in cell phone reception.

So, to keep this kind of data focused, I created a Grafana Dashboard for the trip. The dashboard itself was 99% created by TeslaMate, and I filtered the data from the time I parked my car the night before until I got home. I included just a couple minutes of charging after I got home to make sure I had the final battery percentage in the tables. I hope you enjoy!

So, moving to the trip, my original plan was to charge the battery to 100% over night, drive over a 4,000ft mountain pass to the village of Leavenworth that is about 100 miles away, charge at that location while hanging around town for the day, then drive home along the same route. It turns out, as soon as my kids learned they can watch shows on the screen while parked at a charger, they insist that we let them watch as soon as we plug in. This was okay with me, as it gave me some time to get out, stretch my legs, and walk into a nearby market that actually had normally priced products. There were 13 chargers at the station, and only about 5 of them were occupied by vehicles charging. One was occupied by someone who parked their Tesla at the charging station but was not charging their car. Very rude, and poor etiquette.

The total trip distance turned out to be 221 miles, and it cost me about $13.90 for electricity. By contrast, if we had made the same trip in our Honda Odyssey, the 11 gallons of gas would have cost us about $55 based on local gas prices, which hover around $5/gal if you shop at Costco or a grocery store. As I'll cover a little when going over the charging, you will see I could have cut nearly 25% off of the electricity costs if I were more aggressive with my battery.

I had set the wall adapter to charge the car as slowly as possible the night before. I don't know if this actually matters, but I have never charged the car to 100% before, and wanted to put as little stress on the battery for this first trip. It ended up taking around 10 hours to charge, but I could have done it in 3 or 4 hours if I maxed out my Tesla Wall Adapter. You may also notice that when I charged in Leavenworth, I added 30% capacity to the battery, and I returned home at the end of the day with 43% capacity. This means I did not need to charge the car at all that day, and I could have either completed this trip on a single charge; meaning I could have saved $3 by charging at home compared to using the charger in Leavenworth. Alternatively, I could have charged the battery to 80%, and put less wear and tear on the battery by not charging to 100%. So, it turns out this trip, which apparently a lot of people think is too long for a day trip,

Here I take a look at my battery state of charge for the trip. I had gone a couple days before the trip without charging, which is why the battery was under 40% the night before, and you can see I slowly charged the battery over night. This was done by setting the charger Amperage to try and target my originally scheduled departure time of 8AM; as usual, the family did not like to wake up in the morning, so our actual departure time was a couple hours later. Our power usage increased steadily as we traveled over the mountain pass, then leveled off after crossing Steven's Pass. The majority of the time, we were traveling 55-60MPH the entire time, but I don't think anyone would be surprised to hear that mountains effect battery consumption. We charged up in Leavenworth before parking and hanging around town for the day. Finally, you can see on our way home, we used a lot of battery initially on our way up the pass, and actually regained about 3% going down the other side. The weather was dark and fogging going down the west side of the pass, so we actually slowed down to around 45MPH. Regenerative breaking was used to maintain speed, and this resulted in a little boost.

Finally, here is the elevation chart. I cut off the left side because it was a long line sitting at 387 feet. You can see the mountain pass was about 4,000 ft high, and Leavenworth is about 1,100 ft in elevation. you will also notice right around noon, we stopped at a rest area for the kids. Like I have read many others report, we need to stop for bathroom breaks far more often then we need to stop and charge the car. You can also see while in Leavenworth, we moved the car down by the river at about 17:00 so the kids could play in the park for about an hour before we drove home.

In conclusion, the Tesla was perfectly suited for this type of trip. I also have no doubt that most electric cars these days would have a similar experience. There is an Electrify America charging station just a couple blocks away at a grocery chain across the river from the Tesla chargers, but I didn't actually investigate to see if it was good. I will also noticed that several hotels in the area have destination chargers, which could be nice if you were staying overnight; however I have no experience with that.

In hindsight, I think I should choose a slightly more challenging route for a road trip in preparation for our cross country journey. Maybe something with an overnight stay that requires stopping to charge in both directions to reach our destination. We also primarily drove 2 lane highways for this trip, and I've heard that Interstate highway travel uses more battery. So, until the next phase in my electric car journey, I will go back and plan something.

One final note about the driving experience. As I commented to my wife at one point, the Tesla pretty much drove itself on Basic Autopilot for the entire trip. I had my hand on the wheel, and there were 2 or 3 disengagements where I didn't like the way the car was handling some of the sharper turns, and I often found myself uncomfortable with how close to the center line the Tesla would drive. I am confident it was just keeping the car centered in the lane, but I do prefer hugging the outside line when going 60mph on a 2 lane road; I just don't trust the other people to stay on their side that much. However, the basic autopilot functionality did surprisingly well on those curvy mountain highways.

So, that's all for now. I will start planning for a longer road trip, but I'm really starting to feel good about this cross country trip!

Later,

SteveO

Anywhere You can go, I can go cheaper!

2023-09-12T15:01:00.002-07:00

I have been testing the waters more and more as I drive further in my Tesla; then today Tesla announced they built their 50,000th charging station. Here is a link, if you care to see the interactive version of the map above. So, looking at the availability of all these chargers and hearing testimonials from people who actually drive their Teslas across country makes me feel pretty confident about going on this trip this winter.

Certainly sounds much better than the horror story of Granholm's caravan blocking EV chargers with a gas car. This is an unethical practice called ICEing (verb, ICE = Internal Combustion Engine); in this case they ICEd a family with a baby when her advance team blocked a charger they planned to use for the caravan. Although, part of her problem is that she had a fleet of cars traveling to showcase electric car usage. Which was compounded by the fact that most private charging stations have issues (broken or vandalized chargers are huge problems here.)

One reason using a tesla charger is generally a better experience is the lack of user interface on the machine itself. When you plug the charger into your car, there is a data connection between the charger and the car, and the car itself initiates the charging session. This means you don't need to install an app on your phone, or log into a server to start the charging session.

This weekend, It went to Electrify Expo Seattle, and had some interesting conversations with the companies putting on the show. I was surprised to find out that most of the bicycle vendors had little to no down time on their electric bicycle fleets as they offered test rides to an endless line of people eager to give the bikes a ride. I was especially excited about the Riese & Muller cargo bikes; the ones with the big box in the front that can fit both of my daughters side by side in them. Those were pretty fun to ride, especially the Load 75 which could actually fit 3 kids, but that $10,000 price tag will prevent me from getting it.

The main focus at Electrify Expo is really the cars, and the test drive track! It was fun to compare the acceleration on on the Model X Plaid to the Porsche Taycan; its close, but I think the Model X wins. I was also excited to take a good hard look at the Ford F-150 Lightning, which is a pretty impressive truck. While Ford is supposedly switching to NACS (aka the Tesla port), and they are working with Tesla to work out billing for charging, but right now they still use the CCS connector. I think getting everyone on one charging port is really important, and because it seems like a lot of companies have agreed on NACS, we should just do that and move forward.

So right now, I look at the map above, and feel like it would be easy for me to get across the country in a Tesla. I also like seeing all those destination chargers (the gray dots), which are slower chargers at hotels that are intended for overnight charging while you sleep. Those could be great for topping off if you drive ~50 miles past your charger before stopping for the night.

The biggest "concerns" I hear are from people who don't have electric cars telling me that its not a good idea yet. However, I think the majority of Tesla owners are confident in the Tesla super charging network. Additionally, I'm hoping to find a couple of those new Flying J stations that have electric charging stations too, that could be pretty sweet! So, getting closer to the drive, and I'm pretty excited about it!

Later,

SteveO

Electrified Road Trip Part 2: Tracking with Teslamate

2023-08-28T20:13:00.004-07:00

In preparation for my big road trip, I added Teslamate to my Home Assistant setup. I have to say, I am sad that I didn't do this on day 1. This little platform is amazing, and it not only gets a huge amount of data out of Tesla's cloud and on to my own hardware, but it also generates some wonderful Grafana dashboards too! It is kind of a game changer compared to the way I have collected stats from my current car, and just using the unofficial Tesla Integration for home assistant.

So, the integration's main screen doesn't look like anything special. The map shows the real time location of the car, along with some basic stats about the car. You can also use Geo-fences to give common locations any name you like, and you can even set a charging price for the location. This is particularly useful for charging at home because there is no receipt for purchasing power like you get from a charging station. I will get into manually updating charge prices once I figure that out, but I rarely charge anywhere other than home, so it is a low priority task for me to sort out.

The real advantage comes with 2 backend features this plugin provides. First, the plugin integrates with a database to log all your data about your car. This data goes far beyond just what you see on the plugin page, and this is why Grafana is the real hero for this plugin. The second feature is MQTT, which is just a protocol used by IoT devices to communicate updates. Once you have these two features, you can create dashboards in Grafana to visualize the data and create reports, and MQTT sends the data to home assistant so I can trigger events based on the reported stats.

To the right I show MQTT explorer, which shows an example of the message data Teslamate sends to Home Assistant. This data gets updated in real time, and one thing this does for me is update any time the car is unplugged from the charger immediately, rather than having to wait for the integration to poll Tesla for the data, which can take anywhere from no time to 5 minutes. One problem this caused me a few times is that I would unplug my car, and have Home Assistant log the data to a google sheet; however, if the data didn't get logged immediately my car would not be at home when the data was logged, and my cost estimates would be off. I guess Teslamate removes the need for this Google Integration too, which I appreciate reducing the number of cloud dependencies I have.

Possibly the best part of the this addon is Grafana Dashboards! For those who don't know, Grafana is a web application that can collect data from databases and organize it into Dashboards, which are a collection of charts, graphs, and data. It is somewhat popular for its ability to collect data from many places and combine it all together into a single screen/report that is full of pretty pictures.

Teslamate has a bunch of dashboard that is loads into Grafana if you set it up correctly. Its a great way to visualize things like your most recent trip data and commute data. For example, this image shows a track for everywhere I've driven this month. When I scroll down through the list of drives I've made, I can tell that I drive the same few routes over and over again, and it gives some nice summary information like how efficiently I drive (256 Wh/mi) and the fact I have paid about $13 to drive my car 265 miles (which is WAY cheaper than gas). Just getting access to this data is a critical asset to accurately estimate my personal cost of driving the car, and having a few months of data under my belt will give me a clear picture of how far I can drive my car on a single charge.

For those interested in the process of getting this all set up, I added 3 home assistant add-ons using the instructions on the mat-FFFFFF github repository here. If you are savvy with docker and have a spare raspberry pi laying around, I have to admit most of the troubleshooting resources online focus on putting everything into its own container. However, its not too difficult to follow the directions and get it all setup, but maybe that could be a good thing to write about next. Let me circle back around to that once I get around to refactoring a couple things for best practices.

Anyway, that's it for now. Until next time.

Later,

SteveO

Tesla Purchasing Experience

2023-08-24T20:36:00.001-07:00

So, as I'm getting used to having a Tesla, I thought this would be a good time to look back and reflect on the purchasing experience. This is a really unique experience, and I think it is much better than most of the horror stories I read about on social media. So, for reference, lets go back a couple of months, and walk through our car buying experience this time around.

This spring, my 2007 Honda Accord really started to show its age. The windows stopped working (again), the AC stopped working (again), and it started feeling a little more sluggish than before; basically, it needed some TLC, and I had no more love for it. So we decided we were going to get a new car; we wanted an electric car.

Day 1, I decided I was not going to get a Tesla. I think they are too proprietary, and there is no excuse not to have Android Auto and CarPlay built in. I still feel this way, and the entertainment system just feel crappy in general while driving. We have YouTube Music, and that comes with Ad free Youtube, so we won't consider the supported streaming services. While in park, I can use abettertheater.com to play movies/shows on Plex, and then we have YouTube, Netflix, and Disney+ in the theater, which is fine. Games are okay, but we all have switch game consoles, so we don't care.

Anyway, So, we voyaged out to the dealerships. We went to Nissan, Kia, Hyundai, Subaru, Ford, Chevy... we just spent a couple months looking up every electric vehicle we could find. For reference, every single one of them had Android Auto and CarPlay standard - its just expected in every car (yes, I an REALLY hung up on this). All of them also (mostly) felt like normal gas cars (ICE is the hip term for this BTW, for Internal Combustion Engine). At least, they had a mode that felt like a normal car, and they would have a branded name for a single pedal mode that applies regenerative breaking when you take your foot off of the gas.

I think what finally swayed me to consider a Tesla was how crappy the experience of going to a dealership is. You go in, they show you the top end model even though you say you were a little weary of paying the base model price for a car. They show you a car or two, and they you sit down in the room where they try to pressure you into getting the car or pre-ordering. Honestly, we wanted a Chevy Bolt EUV. It would meet our needs and it was by far the cheapest car of the bunch, but because GM is stopping production in October, we just couldn't get one.

The next couple options we were looking at were the Kia offerings; the Nero or the Hyundai Ionic 5. The biggest issue here is we wanted the seat memory, which was only offered on the top end model. VW and Volvo also had some compelling options, and the Ford Mustang was a strong contender, but going to these dealerships was starting to wear on me and leave a bad taste in my mouth.

One day, I was talking to someone at our daughter's school, and they just purchased a Model Y. It turns out I wasn't paying attention that the price dropped substantially on the Model Y; also, the base model car has pretty much all the features on it. The other trim models only changed the battery and added the option for a 3rd row of seats (we didn't really care about the other differences.) So, I decided to try and test drive a Tesla Model Y. This is where the story actually begins.

I go to the Tesla website to start sorting out models, trims, and other options and find 3 somewhat straight forward options. I see a big link to schedule a test drive; however, I click a referral link that I got from my friend. All Tesla owners get a referral link, and the person who refers you get points that can be redeemed for stuff. For example, the person who referred me got 3 months of full self driving because I bought a car with his link, and some other points for the test drive. I got $1000 off my purchase. I scheduled a test drive, uploaded a photo of my drivers license, and signed a waver. They sent me a calendar invite and a few links to YouTube videos with instructions about how to navigate the touchscreen UI and start the car.

A few days later, I show up to test drive the car. They have the cars all lined up in front of the dealership, I walk up to some and they take me to the front desk. It takes them a minute to find the right key card, but a quick peek at my insurance card, a signature on a temporary registration card, and we are escorted to a parked car in front of the building. There were a couple questions and comments about starting and how different the car is to drive. However, within maybe 10 minutes of showing up I am driving the car I am considering to buy.

At this point I am used to driving an electric car that uses the gas pedal to trigger regenerative braking, but the Tesla has a very aggressive regenerative brake. I kind of slammed on the brakes a couple times during the drive because I didn't realize I lifted my foot off the pedal. Then, I got on the expressway, and this is the moment the Tesla kind of stole my heart; and put a big smile on my face. Its just a lot of fun to have a car that goes when you push the gas pedal. We got back and the lady at the dealership asked us if we had any questions, we had a short conversation and went home. Later that night, my wife picked on my a little because I played Forza after test driving the Tesla.

It was the best experience I had ever had test driving a car. No pressuring me to walk out the door with a contract, and no trying to upsell me on stuff I didn't ask for. I loved the car, even despite the crappy music situation.

We went home and talked about it. We made notes and compared the different cars we drove. The only thing that would have stopped us from getting a Tesla was if the Bolt were available. It had all the features we wanted for $20k less, and we primarily wanted this as a commuter car, so we wanted a smaller monthly payment .

However, in the end, we decided because the Bold wasn't available, the Model Y was the next best option. Most of the other cars were too short, which meant I would hit my head getting in and out. Also, in order to get seats with programmable memory, every car except the tesla required us to upgrade to one of the premium trims, which were usually $10-20K more than the Tesla. The Mustang almost shined here, but we wanted all wheel drive for taking our daughter to Ski Class this winter with her school.

One day, sitting in Chick-fil-A I installed the Tesla App on my phone, chose the options and customizations on a Model Y, and tapped buy. From there, it was a matter of adding my wife and I as owners of the car. We signed up for financing through Tesla because they had the best rate we could find, and even initiated the trade in estimate. The whole process took place on the phone. Then I got the request to schedule delivery; I chose a date and time that worked well for me, and we went to go pick up the car.

In the mean time, I watched countless YouTube videos about checklists that people made to inspect their Tesla when they accept delivery. I felt well prepared to inspect every corner of the car when I arrived. We drove our old car to the dealership, and went inside. Someone was standing at a podium, I said we were here to pick up our Model Y, and he said you walked right past it. He handed me an envelope with some documents and the key cards to open up, and walked me to the car. He told me to click a button in the app, stood there for a minute to see if I had any questions, and then told us to come back in to see him once we looked over the car and were ready to sign.

We walked around the car, opened the trunk and the frunk. We sat in every seat, ran our fingers along all the trim, paired our phones to the Bluetooth, Made sure it locked when we walked away and unlocked for both of us. We were happy, so we went back in to finish signing at a table and hand over the keys to the old car. Again, compared to the other cars I have bought, this was less paperwork, no pressure, and just straight to business.

A couple days later, we found a couple issues. One of the exterior cameras had a chip in the enclosure, the panel over the seatbelt wasn't aligned correctly, and one of the buttons on the steering wheel had an issue when pressing to the left. I scheduled a service appointment through the app. One day, I guy from tesla pulled into my driveway, replaced the defective parts, aligned the panel, and said it was all covered under warranty. We also ordered the garage door opener, which I didn't realize was extra.

All said and done, it was painless, getting the issues serviced was easy (especially because I work from home). Everything was pretty quick and simple. As I've said a couple of times, this was the best purchasing experience I've ever had. No sales people trying to get me to buy today, no dropping my car off for a 10 minute repair. It seems like all the horror stories of delivery didn't happen for me.

I still really hate the entertainment situation. Spotify worked just long enough for me to try and sign up for a free account. Then I got hit with the "premium account required" message. I didn't like the experience on Spotify, so I'm not buying it. I then signed up for Tidal; I even paid the $2 to get a 60 free trial; its better than Spotify, but I really wish I could just use YouTube Music on the screen. Even the Bluetooth experience is lacking compared to other cars. My phone won't play music automatically when it connects like pretty much every car I've use Bluetooth with. I also can't browse playlists on my phone through Bluetooth, which is an option with plex amp. On Tesla, Bluetooth only allows play/pause, next, and previous.

So, I still hate having a locked down car, but at least the rest of the driving experience is good. I also think the video player will come in handy when I go to a supercharger. I also find it very strange that the Tesla doesn't create a WiFi network, so if I purchase premium connectivity, the kids can't use an iPad to watch movies in the back seat while driving. I guess its not the end of the world so long as we download some movies/shows before leaving the house. Anyway, I'll get more into that as we get closer to our road trip.

Later,

SteveO

Electrified Road Trip Part 1: A tale of two maps

2023-08-18T16:12:00.003-07:00

So, we recently became the owners of a new Tesla Model Y. We went with the base model, and only paid to change the paint color and add a trailer hitch (mostly for a bike rack.). I have actually plotted this trip twice so far. Once with the Tesla App, and again with abetterrouteplanner.com (ABRP for short)

I have to admit, I like ABRP more, so it seems to live up to its name. The nice thing about both tools, is they break the route into legs, where you need to stop at a charger. They also both had some functionality for estimating charge times, and how much to charge the battery to make it through the next leg of the trip. However, beyond that, the two. apps start to show their differences.

The Tesla app is nice because its built into the car, and you can start the navigation on your phone, then send it to the car before you get in. The way Tesla has built their ecosystem it feels like this is how you are supposed to do it. The biggest limitation is that its built for you to plot your course and go now, and it also seemed to demand the full potential of the car too. It would frequently use 80-90% of the battery to get you a longer distance, and it the charge times were much longer at each stop. I didn't find a way to change this in the app, but its also possible I missed something. The last gripe I have is that it doesn't show the amenities at each stop from the route screen; if you write down the chargers, then navigate back in the app you can see a row of icons indicating things like bathrooms, food, or shopping near by, but the app doesn't indicate if these things are walking distance from the charger.

ABRP on the other hand has a limitation in that it doesn't work natively on the car; it is a web page, so you can load it in the car's browser, but you lose some features if you do that, like Tesla's built in ability to prep the battery for the supercharger before you arrive at the station. However, you can export the route to Google Maps, Apple Maps, or a Calendar, which are all ways that you can import the suggested stops into the Tesla's built in navigation system (Tesla also has a feature will it will automatically navigate to your next calendar appointment when you get in the car.)

ABRP also allows you to export the stops to a spreadsheet (or view the table in the browser) that outlines all the data you could want. The battery charge you will have on arrival and charge you need to make the next station, estimated charging time, estimated cost, distance to the next station, and drive time. This is basically an itinerary to review the trip and choose the stops you want to make. This is also highly adjustable. You can set the range of your vehicle on a full charge, set min and max limits for how much to charge the battery (I I try to keep it between 20 - 80%.). There is also an adjustment to set if you want more stops with shorter charges, fewer stops with long charges, or optimize for the quickest trip.

Once you create your route, you can click on each charging station to see what types of amenities are near by. It will tell you if there are bathrooms, its dog friendly, has a playground, or is trailer friendly, and it will clarify how many food options you have with names, phone numbers, web sites, and a distance from charger. The map view will use OpenStreepMap data to show you that the restaurant is only 800 ft away, but its across the interstate, so its more like a 1/2 mile walk.

This is a planning tool to help you know if its better to stop in Ellensburg and Mosses Lake, or push your battery a little more and go straight to Quincey. A quick conclusion on that scenario will tell you there are multiple restaurants very close to the chargers in Ellensburg and Mosses Lake, but the one in Quincy is the 1/2 mile walk I talked about in the previous paragraph. I also learned that there are two chargers in Ellensburg, one at 150Kw and another at 250Kw. Now, those are both Tesla chargers, so it would be visible in the Tesla app too, but the tesla app seems to leave a lot to be desired during the planning phase of the trip.

So, you may have noticed I've left out the elephant in the room; most people use Google, Garmin and Apple maps for navigation. Well, as a Tesla owner, there really isn't a convenient way to use any of those maps (well, technically the map data in a Tesla comes from Google.) The big beautiful screen in the car doesn't support Android Auto or Apply CarPlay; a huge negative for any car these days. So, for those who buy an electric car from any other car maker, you will have that experience at your finger tips. However, you can't actually tell Google/Apple/Garmin maps to route your trip to include stops for electric chargers, calculate the charge time for those charger, or calculate the cost of charging. However, the ABRP Android app uses Google Maps for its backend, and the Apple version of the app uses Apple Maps data; so that is worth mentioning.

Speaking of the app experiences, I think its clear at this point I am biased in favor of ABRP. The Tesla experience for trip planning is okay, and its roughly the same in the web browser, mobile app, and on the car. Actually, I think you get a little more google map data in the car than the phone or browser, but I think that's by design. A great thing about using the phone is that all map programs have a nice feature to send a location directly to your tesla; I use this all the time. I often look up current travel time (including traffic) before I get in the car, so having a nice share button to tell my car to navigate there when I get in the car is amazing! This is a tiny thing that makes me happy multiple times a day.

So, back to the ABRP mobile app. I started by visiting the website on my computer and plotting my course. I took that course and investigated which chargers had the amenities I wanted near by to help keep the kids and dogs happy, and now I am going back to the app to create a route with waypoints at my desired chargers. I can also add a stop at a hotel. This was very easy to do, and I created a free account to save my plan. On my phone.

So, this concludes the planning phase of this road trip. However, before the real trip, I am going to test out my theories with a smaller trip. I will be faced with the decision: can I count on my family to stick to a plan using calendar events for each charger? The advantage here is that the Tesla would (in theory) sync my calendar, and load the next charger every time we get in the car. However, this could fall apart and become unwieldy if we don't stick to a schedule; for the record, my family NEVER sticks to a schedule.

The alternate plan would be to send the tesla the location of the next charger from my plan every time we leave a charger. This might work, but could fall apart if cell service to either my phone or the tesla is unavailable. We will just need to try and test it I guess. Until the next phase.

Later,

SteveO

The great webcam shortage of 2020...

2020-05-23T02:24:00.000-07:00

So, among the plethora of missed opportunities that arose for the wise investor (like investing in 3B, Clorox, Moderna, Zoom., etc...) I found another stock that would have been great to buy in March: Logitech. Everywhere you look, all their webcams are sold out. It actually got me to thinking about my own webcams that I've bought over the years...

I have a few laying around the house... I actually noticed that most of my webcams are logitech cameras, and it just turns out that I still have a few of them laying around the house.

In the early days of this blog, I had and old Logitech Quickcam. I say old, but I have the thing I went digging in the garage and I found it. You can see here the photo that I dutifully took in my photobox (affiliate link at the bottom...)

I tried digging for any of the old webcam photos or timelapse videos I used to have, but I can't find anything. Maybe I'll loop back around and fill in more details.

It was an okay camera at the time, but the photos are complete garbage by today's standards. I had some trouble with it because I think the USB cable is going bad after all this time 20+ years, 12 of which have been in a box wrapped up in a ball.

The next camera I managed to dig out of storage is a Logitech QuickCam S5500 (I think?) As it turns out, Logitech doesn't put labels on these things, so I am just going by what my computer thinks it's called.

This is a better camera. It has a higher resolution and a built in privacy guard that slides down over the camera sensor. Honestly, it's about as good as the built in webcam in most laptops. However, it's still pretty lame compared to more moden webcam.

I think I got this camera 12 or 13 years ago. I replaced the QuickCam with it, and I continued to make timelapse videos out my window and save still images on a schedule with the program motion. I just verified that it is still available in Ubuntu's repository too... good old apt install motion, and you are on your way.

It's funny to think that back then, I would save a still photo into a folder every second. Those photos were stitched into a 14-hour timelapse, and every 5 seconds, the image was copied into a folder synchronized to dropbox and shared publicly. Then I had a simple javascript utility that would refresh the 5 most recent right here on this blog. ahh, those were some interesting days of manually writing HTML and XML documents to generate my resume with XSLT.

Finally, these days, I have a Logitech C922 on my computer. I actually had a C920 at one point, and I got the corporate/lync/skype certified C930e for my Mom when she threw a baby shower for Renmin and I. This form factor was used with a number of webcams. This one supports 1080P video, and the corporate one has the same sensor, but a wider angle lense. I also had one that was nearly identical to this camera, but it only supported 720P.

It's a pretty good camera, and in addition to video quality, the audio quality of the stereo microphones is pretty good too. Some people have even told me it's better than my Plantronics headset, but I tend to use my Bose QC35+ headset during video calls, and people tell me that sounds great!

So I didn't just want to show you the cameras, I also setup a little photo shoot to compare them...

15+ year old QuickCam

The QuickCam has low resolution, has trouble dealing with the brightness of the lightbox, and you need to manually focus by turning the ring around the lense. I also had trouble because I think the cable is going bad, and most photos I took turned out blurry even though I had the camera on a tripod.

12 year old QuickCam S5500

The QuickCam S5500 is a little better. It actually has auto focus, and it had no trouble dealing with the bright lights in the lightbox. You can even see the angle is wide enough to get the back corner of the box. The two QuickCam models are actually in about the same spot, so you can see how much wider the angle is on the S5500.

5 year old Logitech C922

Next, I get to a more modern webcam. Now, this camera has such a wide angle compared to the other two, that I had to move the camera in closer, and I still couldn't get rid of the back corners.

I guess just for good measure, I'll add a photo from my phone...

7 month old Pixel 3 XL smartphone

It really is amazing to look at how far digital cameras have come in the past 20 years. I remember in 2000 it has a huge deal when we had a digital camera that saved BMP images is a 1.4MB floppd disk. It was so cool that we could just carry around this "small" 3.5" disk and save a few pictures on it.

Now I'm not happy if a camera doesn't support 4K video or HDR. How times have changed.

Anyway, It's time for me to get some sleep, so Goodnight...

Later,

SteveO

Virtual Interview Difficulties, and my plan to make it better.

2020-05-22T13:58:00.003-07:00

Hey, so I guess I have had some trouble getting back into the idea of blogging. Maybe I can make a recovery and not just rant about politics, but I don't know...

I've had a lot of stress in my life recently with: my boss retaliating against me for the crime of having a child; then being forced to work for the county for 6 months under the threat of paying over $25,000 if a quit (a type of debt slavery); then finally being able to quit, but dealing with my offer being retracted everyone stopped hiring because of this virus. If not for my totally awesome family and that COVID stimulus check, I would be totally screwed right now (instead I still have a fleeting hope of making through this in one piece while my wife works). Anyway, enough about me, I made my bed, I can work it out.

It wasn't all bad though. I went through a round of interviews for Google. It was an Software Engineer - Engineering Productivity interview (SWE-EngProd). I was super excited by the idea of what I could do at the job, but unfortunately, I didn't make it through the hiring committee. This is the second time I have made it this far in a Google Interview, but this time I really had a hard time with the virtual online interviews. My excuse is the lack of a white board.Which has got me thinking about my next interview. So... I got an idea... If I practice like this:

Then maybe I should interview like this:

I don't know, maybe it's crazy to think like that ;P.

Regardless, I have an Amazon interview coming up, and I have been working on how I could do camera switching with Chime, and I came up with this idea.

I had purchased that overhead camera a while ago on Amazon just to see if this might work. At the time I was thinking about creating an online YouTube class, and all the MOOCs I saw on Coursera and Udacity featured a video of a hand drawing on a white board. So, I thought, why can't I do that? I explain crap all the time to people. So I bought it.

Now, the camera mount I got isn't available anymore, but the identical item can still be purchased under a different name. Here is an affiliate link if you think you want to buy one of these:(I.E. I get paid if you click the link and buy one.) Anyway, here are links to the "Photo Copy Stand" and the webcam I have connected to it:

Full disclosure, I used a cheap little dry erase board I had laying around, but I did just buy a 48"x36" magnetic dry erase board for the back of my office door, and it works great with those magnetic dry erase markers. I am normally an expo marker person, but the Amazon bookstore in the mall had those in the checkout isle, so I grabbed it while getting something else.

I also used those cool little 2040 Design Studio Pugoo pads, where are these awesome sticky pads that I use as a non-permanent adhesive, but it looks like that company doesn't exist anymore. So, I can't shill for them too. That's right people, I am selling out by putting an advertisement on my blog. What else will unemployment drive me to do?

I promise not to go too crazy with the advertising, but I think the context here works, so I'm going to do it. Oh, about that $165 webcam, that price is inflated due to COVID. Normally, that's a $70 webcam, but because everyone is working from home, laptop webcams suck, and most people don't like the new $200+ webcams, this older but still pretty good webcam is in much higher demand that normal. So, unless you are desperate, wait for Logitech to pick up production again.

ok, so, I'm trying my hand at being a corporate shill, but at least I'm promoting some things I actually use... I think saying that will help me sleep at night. Other than that, the family is doing good. We still have the house, and I'm still interviewing for work, and that's about it for now.

Later,

SteveO

Regarding Bernie Blackout

2020-05-22T12:17:00.000-07:00

So, many of you may have heard about the recent Vice documentary Bernie Blackout. I recently saw it, and I have to say it's nice to know other people noticed the same thing as me. I think they sum it up best with this one chart I grabbed from the show:

Screen clipping from the Vice Bernie Blackout Documentary.

I think it's really telling that every single time one of the news networks started talking about Bernie, it was phrased in a negative light. For example, all candidates had about 2% of their supporters talk negatively about others online, but because Bernie had more supporters than all others combined, this lead to the invention of a false "Bernie Bro" narrative. If he won a state, then it was somehow the smallest win in history. They call this the Carl Rove strategy in the documentary, and I guess so, I don't really know to be honest.

Then there are the three spikes that occur in that bar graph: one the day before super tuesday, one at the end of super tuesday, and one on April 9th. These are interesting because the largest spike, before super tuesday, the media chose to talk about everyone except Bernie. Then the other two spikes were the two times where Bernie was talked about more than the others candidates; these were the day the media reported Bernie lost on super tuesday, and the day Bernie announced he was dropping out, proclaiming that Biden "won".

However, Biden didn't really win. He was propped up by every other candidate that dropped out as well as the media narrative. It's the same thing that happened with Hillary in 2016. Bernie was filling stadiums with people he would bring to the Democratic Party; not the anti-Trump crowd that would vote Democrat no matter what, but people who have lost hope in our political system and would have voted for someone who actually believes what they are saying. Those who are disenfranchised by people like Hillary and Biden. The people who the Democratic Party doesn't care about. People who actually believe in democracy.

Overall, I liked the documentary, and I think you should hop on over to Vice and watch it. I felt that sort of tightness in your chest when someone is preaching to the choir of a repressed group; you know, it just kept tugging on my heart strings. It pointed out a lot of things I felt were obvious. Like the fact that people supported Bernie because he was promoting what they believed, not some evil old man putting ideas in their head. It's why Hillary lost in 2016, and it's why I think Biden lost on April 9th. Not because Bernie didn't support Biden, but because Biden (Hillary 2.0) doesn't stand for anything.

So, this is where I lose faith in our system again. The same thing happened in 2016. I had hopes for a candidate that would actually believe the purpose of government is to serve the people which is represents, but then we ended up with a choice between a douche and a turd sandwich.

Anyway... I guess that's my rant for now.

Later,

SteveO

Adventures in the Land of Oracle and the Peoplesoft Test Framework

2019-10-08T16:40:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody,

I've been writing test cases with the PeopleSoft Testing Framework for the past year and a half, and I've found it hard to find any real objective feedback regarding how this framework operates and whether it's a tool that various businesses want to use. So, I thought I would scribble my thoughts on the matter, and talk about testing with this interesting tool. Oh, and just to be clear, I have a strong opinion that I am sure you will understand by the end. (Scroll to the last line if you want to know the spoiler.)

First, what is this thing about which I speak? Oracle bought PeopleSoft some years back, and a tester on that PeopleSoft team wrote a UI automation tool to test new features when they come out. He called this thing the PeopleSoft Testing Framework (which I will call PTF). It is included with PeopleSoft, and it is a database-driven layer on top of Selenium as well as a UI to write/record and playback tests.

When the County hired me to come on board and write their tests, I had never touched PeopleSoft before, and all I knew about it was that big companies use it for HR like stuff. I think they hired me because the PTF UI had just enough clues for me to look at it, and see the similarities with Selenium development.

Because I know Oracle gets a little litigious at times, I'll just describe the UI rather than post a screenshot. The UI feels like a 90s era muti-document interface, complete with awkward elements that won't fit quite right on the page, and the inevitable empty spaces that almost always take up a third of the screen. You have a sidebar that displays a folder tree along the left side, and inside that you will find tests and test shells. The test shells are containers for you to execute tests from in a specific order. The main meat of the program comes from tests - which look a lot like test shells - and are displayed as a table of values. Each row is a test step, and the steps have some general properties like ID, comments, and a checkbox to toggle a step active/inactive; however, the meat of the tests is contained in the Type, Action, Recognition, Parameters, and Value fields.

Type is used to point your action to a type of element on the page, the browser itself, or back at the PTF tool to run a function. Each Type has a list of supported Actions (I.E. the type "button" has a "click" action. The Recognition is mostly used for HTML element selectors, but there are exceptions to this, like the "Page" type, which uses GoTo and a unique identifier for the page. You can pass Parameters to a special type of test call a library tests, and the "Get Property" Action on many Types will use Parameters to determine the exact property you want as well as what Variable you will store it as. Finally, every test has a set of Test Cases, which use the Value field to create variants of the test.

Here is an example of what a test case would look like:

Type	Action	Recognition	Value
Browser	Start_Login
Page	Prompt	ManagePosition.GBL	add
Page	PromptOk
Text	Set_Value	name=POSITION_DATA_EFFDT$0	&effdt

The above, opens a new browser and logs in with a test user specified in the global PTF configuration (more on that later.) it loads a page, with a value of "add", which actually loads a URL within the PTF environment (again in the global configuration), then clicks over to a section to create a new user. PromptOk is a special action to click that add user command. Finally, it enters text into a textbox on the page with the desired name. The Value here is actually a variable, stored globally in the database.

So, I said globally there a couple times. PTF uses a global configuration for each environment; this locks down the base URL for the test, specifies a browser, and securely stores a username/password for use in your tests. Also, because EVERYTHING is stored in the database, so are the variables, in fact, you can view your PTF variables using the regular PeopleSoft web UI. There are also certain permissions in PeopleSoft security to allow a user to create, modify, or run PTF related things. I'm not getting into that here.

Now, I described the UI a lot, but if you go down the road to learn about PTF, everyone promotes the test recorder feature. It does it's job well, but only works in Internet Explorer, and not even Microsoft wants to support that anymore; however, it will record what you click on and where you go. There are also a few configuration options for making it recognize when you are just clicking through menus, and it will deactivate those steps in favor of a single goto action (however, it saves both methods to the test.

Once you record some tests it is time to playback, which is the part about PTF I hate the most. When you playback tests they run extremely slow. I don't know if it's something the County has done or everyone has the same problem, but the tests are only capable of filling out about one text box per minute. I have seen it take 5 minutes just to log into the system. In theory, your tests would be running over night when nobody is sitting around watching the paint dry, but I have had a lot of problems getting command line execution to work correctly, and nobody can touch the keyboard or mouse while the tests are running. I have also had a whole host or problems getting it to run in a Windows VM as well, and you can wave goodbye to Linux support.

We found that things run well as long as we had a dedicated computer sitting in a corner cube to run the tests on, and we didn't mind leaving the computer unlocked when we walk away while still signed in... this part always makes me cringe. I dread the day someone causes havoc while logged in with my credentials because of this issue. I have found that if I log in using remote desktop, things work okay most of the time, but then I need to babysit the tests because we will occasionally get errors because it won't type in a value in some random text box; I suspect this is some sort of network related snafu, but it makes execution hard. If you run in Hyper-V, get ready for random crashes and network failure messages, and god help you if you are connected to a VPN.

As you might have picked up on at this point, running the tests requires constant babysitting. I was told and once upon a bunch of the tests passed on to me ran smoothly, and nothing ever went wrong, but in my experience, this has never been the case. You will run a testshell, that shell will call five test cases that run great, then the sixth one fails. You review XML the log in PTFs internal log viewer and find that it didn't type in a required field, and the test failed half way through creating a complex object. Fixing the problem looks like this:

You take the shell you are running, and deactivate the tests that succeeded
click into the failed test, make sure you are viewing the correct test case
deactivate whatever steps succeeded
possibly add an extra step to open the partially created object and edit it
deactivate all the steps in the shell after the object is created
re-run the test... the mysterious failure goes away!
remove or deactivate the step that you possibly added to the test
re-activate all the stuff that was deactivated in step 3
deactivate everything that has been run in the shell
reactivate anything that was not run in the shell
run the shell again and pray you don't get another failure like that
possibly repeat steps 1-11 several times, but for a different failure in another part of the shell.

As a result of running these automated tests a few times, I know in detail all of the steps created in each script. I know that if one part of the test fails, I need to manually go into the database and correct the data by hand with SQL or a compare report will fail. I have an intimate knowledge of this kind of thing just from troubleshooting my tests, and saying.. well, lets see what happens if I just push forward with the tests even though that step failed... or I just repeat this step and create a new position rather than correcting an incorrect position.

Getting support from Oracle is painful. You always get sent to an over-sea support center where they ask the same 10 questions before escalating your issue, meanwhile, you only get one message per day unless you decide to work in India's time zone; often times, issues will magically resolve themselves after a week with no action done by you.

There is also no community support. Or very little. Most forum topics are asking for success stories with PTF, and the Oracle PTF focus group hasn't proven to be a source of information. The only documentation Oracle has on the the tool is a chapter in their documentation on PeopleTools, and a $2,000 course that pretty much just walks you through the UI, and the teacher will not understand in-depth technical questions about the tool.

However, in the back of my mind, I keep looking back on my previous decade of experience before coming to work here. I think back to the days of coding tests in Specflow/C#/Selenium... or Mocha/Webdriver.io/Javascript... heck, the other day, just for laughs I implemented a few of my tests in Robot Framework with Python... and that is when I lost all hope for PTF.

I admit, the idea of hiring a developer to write automated tests can be intimidating, but if you have a budget for using PeopleSoft, you have a budget for it. The thing about Robot Framework specifically that really won my admiration at this point is actually the report it generates. Just google RobotFramework tutorials on YouTube, or you might be able to access Lynda.com for free via your public library's website (you don't even need to leave home!) Why do I happen to like it? I'm glad you appear to care!

Robot Framework has a nice keyword driven syntax. So, you can start by describing your test in english, and gradually convert each sentence into code. For example, start by writing a user-story like suite name "As a ___ I want to do ___ so that ____ happens." Then elaborate with a series of "Given ___ when someones does ____ then ____ happens" tests. Each line of that file is a keyword, so, you can create a hierarchy of .robot files that define each keyword as a series of steps. There are tons of libraries to add database, API, and even Selenium/Appium functionality to your tests, and if you really need custom functionality, everything is open source, and there are even tutorials on how to create your own custom libraries written in python.

The tests support running locally, pointing at your own Selenium grid, or pointing to a cloud provider like browserstack of Saucelabs. You can even run multiple browser simultaneously. However, best of all, is that report file. It gives you a great summary that breaks down each file run into a bar graph of how many tests in that file passed/failed. When you hit failures, clicking on the failed test opens a detailed log page, and you can drill down to the exact step that failed (complete with screenshots.)

As a proper test automation framework, RobotFramework gives you the ability to write a custom piece of code that automatically run before/after all the tests as well as before/after each test. Plus, there is a Jenkins plugin that perfectly integrates the whole thing into your build reporting pipeline. Using a different CI server? Don't worry, you just need to specify a folder to save the report in, which will contain everything you need. results are in XML by default, but you can change formats if that works better for you. I'm sure people will make more plugins for the Atlassian and Microsoft crowd too.

The final amazing part is that there is tons of documentation and an active community. During the process of writing a few tests as a POC to compare against PTF, I found a link to almost everything I needed on the main website, and nearly all the github documentation pages followed the same format. Nearly every question I came up with had an answer on Stack Overflow already. The couple I had to ask were answered pretty quickly.

So, my conclusion is that it's really hard to compare PTF with a Selenium framework. The theory behard PTF is that your PeopleSoft experts will be able to record tests and play them back rather than running tests manually, and sometimes it works that way, but my experience has not gone that way at all. The reality has been that I need to fall back on my Selenium experience and web development background constantly. I frequently end up using browser development tools for inspecting elements and exploring page DOMs to better define my selectors. I've spent so much time debugging the tests, I constantly wonder if it really is faster than running the tests manually.

That said, let me circle back for a second to this topic of learning curve, because that seems to be the #1 thing going for PTF at this point. For that, I point you to Selenium IDE. A wonderful tool that gives you almost all of the functionality of PTF. Just record you tests in a browser, and you can play back the tests. However, when troubleshooting, in both situations, you will need a lot of technical knowledge to parse through the depths. So, if you are writing Selenium tests in C#, PTF might be easier, but it's not nearly as powerful. Javascript is probably just as steep of a learning curve. However, I think Python with Robot Framework is the easiest way to go.

TLDR:

PTF has poor documentation, little-to-no community support, inadequate corporate support, its limited to only controlling a single browser ata time, while connecting to a single PeopleSoft environment at a time, on a dedicated computer, and has no Continuous Integration server support. On the other hand, Selenium has tons of documentation, a massive community, supports multiple simultaneous browsers, can handle multiple URLs to any site simultaneously, can run in the background on your workstation, and was built to be run from a Continuous Integration server. Additionally, Selenium is way faster, and only a slightly steeper learning curve in some cases.

Anyway... I just had to vent for a few minutes... PTF is driving me nuts right now.

Later,

SteveO
Spoiler: I have grown to hate PTF and will never recommend people stray away from Selenium.

Can I come back to blogging?

2019-06-14T15:30:00.002-07:00

So, I've been debating with myself if I want to go back to blogging again. I tried switching to wordpress for a little while, and I even hosted my own wordpress blog on my home computer (pretty much just for personal journaling, not really to share.) I keep wondering if anyone really cares what I have to say.

So, in the meantime I've: had 2 kids; bought a house; changed jobs... 3 times?; gotten what seems like a dozen certifications; Jaani died; and firmly established that I hate mowing the lawn.

Some of these things have not been completely positive... Jaani died on my birthday last year, which was a pretty traumatizing event; I'm just happy my older daughter didn't cry too much, because I would have lost it. My younger daughter has officially been alive for 4 weeks as of today. That's kind of an accomplishment; even if a really low bar. My marriage is going really well; it appears I married super mom, and it just adds to the immediately apparent things that have gone well (however, improvements to our financial situation is probably still more immediately apparent... despite taking a 30% pay cut to work at the County.

So, let me break out to talk about the work situation. In April of 2016... oh man, I had just left Avanade... that seems like a lifetime ago. My wife was still pregnant with our first daughter. So, I had left Avande on April 1st... they announced in the previous January that they were outsourcing our team to India... I spent the next few months teaching unqualified people in India how to do my job. I honestly don't think any of them knew what they were doing, and inside sources tell me the project was scrapped as a result. Avanade offered me a lesser job on April 4th... literally the next working day after April 1st. I interviewed for Rightside, Amazon, and Avanade in the middle of April. Avanade wasn't really so much of an interview, because I had interviewed for that role the previous February, but a check in to see if I would come back.

I told Avanade I would take the roll so I wouldn't lose unemployment for the next few weeks before I could start there. Amazon and Rightside spent a week or two deliberating as they interviewed candidates; they responded within a day of eachother, and I chose Rightside because they had the most competitive of an offer as Rightside did... So I ended up accepting the Avanade role, worked for three days, and quit when Rightside made an offer. I worked at Rightside's Enom.com team until January 2017, when our team was sold to Tucows, and they laid off everyone. So, after a short search, I moved on to a contract with Expedia; I stayed there for about 10 months. My manager there actually left after a month, so the whole 3-month contract-to-hire idea got messed up, and the team didn't have a budget to bring me on full time. At one point, I saw a job application for the County, and just applied to see what it would be like. They made me an offer, but it was a full 30% less than I was making at Expedia. Honestly, I probably should have stayed at Expedia to see if they would make an offer once things on the team stabilized again, but - with some pressure from my wife - I decided to try life at a government job. To be honest, it's stable, predictable, and low pressure most of the time, but I fear it doesn't challenge me enough.

So yea, that's my work story for the past 3 years...

Things are heating up on the training side too. Last year, I did Microsoft Technical Associate certifications in Python and Computer Science; I got my ITIL certification, and I took 2 Peoplesoft classes covering PTF and Peoplesoft Security. This year, I completed my Six Sigma Yellow Belt certification, and I'm committed to getting my ISTQB certification in mid-July. I also signed up for a Google Cloud 12-week challenge to get a Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification, which makes me wonder if I should just go ahead and get my MTA for Cloud Fundamentals just because it's free... I am also thinking about getting the Amazon Cloud Practitioner certification just to be well rounded.

In addition to those certifications, I also finished a Professional Certificate in Six Sigma and Lean from the Technical University of Munich, and I will probably get the Google Cloud Architecture Specialization from Coursera because I can get a free month to work on it, and I will probably have some time with my upcoming parental leave.

Life with kids is different too. I was starting to get used to having one around, and now that we have two, I feel like I need super mom to gain some upper body strength (the one area she is lacking...) It gets hard to carry both of them around, and she is already overpowered by one 2 1/2 year old...imagine a 2 year old with a 4 1/2 year old... But the kids are great overall. They have their moment. Right now they compete to see who can cry louder at 3AM... or how many times they can make mom go back-and-forth between the two bedrooms. However, with the older one being able to talk more... and form sentences. They say the darndest things.

anyway... that's a huge update. Let's see if I can keep this up to keep things brief in the future 'eh?

later,

SteveO

My post politically active year ever!

2016-04-24T13:59:00.001-07:00

So, aside from being a vocal Bernie Sanders supporter, I have also participated in more aspects of the social process than ever before. I have been a regular contributor by making small $10 weekly payments to Bernie's Campaign, and I've even engaged in phone banking (an activity that I absolutely despise.) All because I feel like for the first time in my life, a political figure actually represents my views. However, I have been learning a lot about Hillary supporters in this process, and I would like to take a few minutes to describe what I am hearing from them.

First of all, there is not much (if any) talk about what actual policies Hillary supports. The vast majority of people I speak with just say they want to vote for her, and usually say they don't have a reason. Honestly, who can blame them. News channels like CNN and MSNBC only cover how much Hillary disagrees with the other candidates, but there is never any talk about what Hillary is planning to do. She just talks about how she is being attacked by Bernie Sanders, who has tried more than any other candidate to keep the debate about policy issues, but she has only engaged in mud slinging.

If her time as First Lady, A Senator, or as Secretary of State are any indication of what to expect, then we can rest assured it will be a year dominated by news of the various scandals she is involved with. We can rest assured that she will continue to deregulate the banks, and we can be certain that the countless wars we actively engage in will continue to receive more tax dollars year after year. Furthermore, the TPP would be signed, and tax loopholes would be expanded to provide new alternatives to Panama, now that recent events have exposed that loophole. Our healthcare system would continue as is, and she would make more grants available to finance college education; both of these are part of the problem leading to astronomical College tuition rates and healthcare costs. This is what we should expect if Hillary does exactly what she has been doing throughout her career.

I have not talked with a single Hilary supporter who understands what Hillary will do, nor can they even explain what she claims she will do. Again, who could blame them. In order to figure out what her claims are, you need to sift through pages of empty campaign slogans and glittering prizes, and you still won't read much about what she actually plans to do. Most of the time, especially in terms of campaign finance, you are looking at a candidate who benefits greatly from Citizens United and secret funding from Super Pacs; not to mention that she gets sanctioned for campaign finance violations in every campaign she has run. However, thanks to the Clinton Defence Fund, she can just treat these pesky fines as the cost of doing business as usual. If she did bring campaign finance reform, it would most likely be in the form of opening up contributions so she wouldn't have to pay so much in court fees and sanctions.

One thing Hillary has established, is that she knows how to speak out against the ideas of others, but where she is lacking is the actual follow through on her own views. She considers contacting your state representatives and asking them to support your candidate "harassing the Super Delegates." She calls Bernie Sanders unqualified with no basis, and then claims she is being viciously attacked when Bernie said taking tens of millions in campaign funds from special interest groups through her Super PACs makes her unqualified; he claims that supporting the Panama Free Trade Agreement makes her unqualified. Honestly, based on her campaign claims from her own website, she is claiming that she will eliminate the very things that have allowed her to run for president.

I cold continue to go on, and honestly, when it comes to the issues she lists on her own site, nearly every one of them is in direct contradiction to the actions she has taken throughout her political career. Honestly, I can't go through all 30 of them here, but I encourage you to do some fact checking, and see what she has actually done. You , may be suprised to find that while many of the points she makes on her site seem good on the surface, she does not have a plan to achieve any of them, and history has shown that she typically voted against these views in the past; with a few exceptions like Alzheimer's, sexual assault, and disability rights. However, those are no-brainer issues that have not even come up during the campaign; additionally, everyone agrees with those points.

In closing, Anonymous has a great video that lists the scandals that Hillary was involved in. While I admit some of these are not substantiated claims, but it was proven that she repeatedly lied to the public, she pardoned FALN terrorists, and repeatedly committed record setting campaign fraud offenses. Anyway, take a look at this video, and judge for yourself.

Why I Chose Bernie Sanders

2016-03-26T15:53:00.000-07:00

Before half of our precinct showed up, they had to move us to the hallway because we didn't fit in the room...

After caucusing today, I got really riled up about why I chose Bernie. (121 people in my precinct, 93 for Bernie, 23 for Clinton – well over 1,000 for my district showed up!) Part of it was because I chose to get involved when it came time to give arguments supporting him after the Clinton candidates spoke, and the thoughts are bouncing around in my head now, so I feel like I need to get them out! So, here I go… A vote for Bernie is a vote for:

Eliminating the health insurance racket, not reforming it.
Eliminating the overpriced private school system we refer to as Universities and Colleges, in favor of updating our public school system to include a college education. Increasing access to grants and student loans has resulted in over a Trillion dollars of outstanding debt, and the 37th education system in the world in terms of quality.
Eliminating tax loopholes, that allow large corporations like the NFL, Microsoft, Walmart, and Apple to shift profits to overseas tax havens, costing the American public Billions in taxes each year (I.E. $40 Billion from Microsoft and nearly $100 Billion from Apple every year!) Plus we all know the NFL should not be considered a non-profit tax-exempt organization.
A vote to repeal citizens united, which Hilary has utilized in every campaign she has run in the past 6 years (thus, no way in hell she would change that.) I suppose rootstrikers.
A vote for trying to confront Islamic extremists by disproving their argument (and primary recruiting tool) that the western world doesn’t care about them.
The only hope for achieving peace in the middle east is to treat each of the countries involved as equal partners in a mutual resolution to conflict. (I.E. Remain neutral and not side with Israel and Saudi Arabia exclusively in opposition to Iran).
We need to adjust our tax laws to remove tax caps for high income households; especially in terms of the 15% investment income tax, which almost exclusively applies to people with annual income above a million dollars.
We need to ask the question of where the money to pay for war is coming from. This money is obtained by punishing the teachers and schools in this country with insufficient funding. It is obtained by punishing the citizens of this country by not maintaining our existing infrastructure. It is obtained by devaluing public transportation, and denying people a mass transit alternative.
We need to recognize that we only have one planet, and if we break it we might not be able to fix it. Global warming is real, and regardless of how it is happening, we need to take every action possible to slow or reverse it’s effects. We need to reduce subsidies for oil, coal, and nuclear power production, and increase subsidies for solar, wind, and geothermal power production. There is no reason we shouldn’t have a 100% green power grid by 2020.
We need to promote a more sustainable materials economy. Our buildings, electronics, and other consumer goods need to be designed to be broken down into raw components that can be used for the next generation of consumer goods. This type of technological ecosystem will reduce the burden of disposing of waste, and reduce the demand for destructively mining new raw materials.
Electric vehicles are one of our best bets to reduce CO2 emissions. Even though the current electric grid would produce a similar or greater emission per mile than gasoline cars; centralizing the source of emissions increases the feasibility of eliminating CO2 emissions from transportation.

Adventures to Amazon Land

2014-05-23T01:23:00.000-07:00

South Lake Union Neighborhood seen from Lake Union

South Lake Union Park

On the North side of downtown Seattle is a neighborhood called South Lake Union. It is, as the name suggests, South of Lake Union. On the shore of the lake you will find the MOHAI (Museum of History & Industry) as well as the center for wooden boats. (Also home to the Jeff Bezos learning center - extra points if you know why he is relevant). At the other side of the neighborhood is Denny Way, and my new employer The Seattle Times.

MOHAI

Center for wooden boats

Space Needle from Seattle Times

Amazon construction

In the middle is the place where everything you buy comes from... At least the world headquarters. That is, the main campus of Amazon's would headquarters. It's a wonderful mix of brick and mortar retail shops... with the online giant that's putting them out of business sitting right on top.

Riding S.L.U.T. to Amazon

Part of Amazon Campus

A land of contradictions... it's named after a place synonymous with nature, but in a place where anything older than me is decimated and covered in concrete. Retail stores in the capitol of online shopping. Its a hip little space with bars, stores, restaurants, and even a Microsoft office mixed in there.

I get coffee here in the morning

Along the ground snaking through the forest of construction cranes is Westlake Ave... and the S.L.U.T. (South Lake Union Trolley) - a trolley that apparently uses the honor system to collect fares. The person riding with me tells me he has been taking it every day without paying, and watching a few other people board I relief that nobody really pays. I had to laugh a little at that. I watch the S.L.U.T. pass me every morning as I walk to work, and if I really wanted, it would reduce a 1\2 mile walk into a small city block.

I rode the S.L.U.T. back from Lake Union to the south end of the line. Which is the heart of the shopping district. Westlake Center, where the bus tunnel, most surface buses out of the city, the S.L.U.T., and the monorail all meet. From this point, its a short walk to the Pike Market, the Elliot Bay waterfront, and the convention center, and all kinds of stores.

Monorail

The Bus Tunnel

Park at Westlake Center

My purpose for visiting Westlake is usually because I'm either entering or leaving the city. In this case, I came for the bus tunnel... a weird pseudo-subway where buses and trains meet in the same tunnel. Here, the light rail can take you to the airport, and based on what looks like an honor-system fare situation, I bet most people ride for free. The ebb and flow of people gathering in the station, then boarding and heading off on the light rail is neat to watch. A train comes about every five or ten minutes, and because my bus was running about 20 minutes behind, I got to watch a few groups of people gather and board.


My broken bus...	Where my bus broke down...	Local Artwork...

Of coarse, today was not my most lucky day riding the transit lines. My bus broke down just before getting on the Interstate to head back to Renton. They said the check engine light came on, and it's against the rules for them to get on the highway with the light on...

Anyway, the bus parked for about 30 minutes until a new bus could arrive, then I boarded on and went home.

So, if you ever wondered about Amazon's campus, or what the area is like... maybe this will give you an idea.

Later,

SteveO

It's been a long time... How have you been?

2014-04-05T18:59:00.000-07:00

I think the quote from GLaDOS is appropriate for any return after a long time. The Portal villain certainly reminds me of my favorite things of the video game. After all, it's all for science.

That's not what I came to babel about this time. To be honest, I was starting to wonder if I would ever return to this blog, or if it had faded into the ether of my distant past. I find myself writing more in a book these days than on the Interwebs, but I don't know why. Perhaps I don't always want to share my thoughts with the world first. I guess I could do that, but digital permanence and all.

I recently have had a few things change. I went through one of the hardest break ups I've ever experienced, and a couple days later I lost my job. I didn't care about the job though; it seems that SDETs are in high demand around these parts, and I have no shortage of options.

I recently started thinking about moving to Portland. I love Seattle, and it would be hard for me to move on from here, but a breakup followed by loosing my contract, and finally a call from some recruiter who might offer you a way better job than you had... it all seems to feel like it was meant to be. Funny enough, just the breakup made me think of leaving town to get a fresh start.

Anyway, maybe that's a thing... maybe I'm just babbling again... whatever it is, I might have some changes around the corner, but in the mean time, I have more time on my hands. Maybe I'll just start blogging again for a while? time will tell.

Later,

SteveO

No picture today...

2011-11-02T01:31:00.000-07:00

I don't have a picture (because I'm still waiting for my camera) however, maybe I can describe it for you...

Anyway, I have been waking up just before the sun rises to the point it would be visible if the clouds weren't hanging around. In fact, the clouds are right on top of me most mornings, and even below me as I walk my lap around the river. Along Riverside Drive, across the bridge at Wells, backtrack through Jones Park, and cross the river again at Bronson. It's a short walk, maybe a quarter mile at best, but it is just enough to help wake me up and make sure Jaani can do his morning business.

I fill up Jaani's dish with food, and then I dump out, rinse, and refill his water dish with nice cool water from my filtered pitcher in the fridge. This time of day, my phone keeps my rhythm for me... Cock-a-doodle-doo marks the time to wake up. I need to get up for my morning eat and clean... Beep-beep, Beep-beep and it's time to take the dog for his walk. Usually I get the early 1900's phone noise before making it back to the apartment, which means I need to check his food and water. Honk honk means the bus is about 15 minutes out. However, the bus alarm isn't just based on a specific time. Sometimes it comes earlier than I expect... This alarm is from an App on my phone (other than the default clock app). It updates the bus schedule in real time. I can pick up my phone and see how many minutes I have until the bus gets there. It is handy. (One Bus Away is the name of the app FYI.)

My phone is my master of scheduling. Something that makes me very nervous to tinker with now that I use it for more than just fun and games. A feeling that makes me a little nervous about the idea of getting the latest and greatest new gadget on release day; however, I suspect it still won't stop me.

So, this marks the time when I start heading toward the bus. I need to allow about 10 minutes to walk to the bus stop in order to get there in time. Sometimes I can wait a couple minutes because I time the lights just right, but usually the bus is pulling up just after I arrive at the terminal. I usually manage to get a seat toward the back, but today I actually had to sit near the front (in the sideways seats that are reserved for elderly and handicap people (usually that just means I need to sit sideways and can't lean my head back.

Although I wouldn't lean back if I could. I break out my tablet, plug in my headphones, and watch a video lecture. I have about 30 minutes to watch lectures before I arrive at Overlake Transit Center. I am excited about this bus ride in the summer. The view of Mt Rainier from 520 East while leaving Bellevue is an excellent way to start your day off. The fog is usually below the horizon. The sun is behind the Cascade range to the East... Rainier to the South. The left side of the mountain glows, the glacier on top can even blind you on a sunny morning when the sun hits it just right. The right side of the mountain is dark and takes on a blue tint from the shade. Sometimes the mountain wears a white fedora, almost as if it was lifting it's hat to say good morning. For this, and only this, reason I almost always sit on the right side of the bus in the morning.

Once I arrive at Overlake, I am just across the street from the Studios West Campus. Well, across 520, which is a six lane road with two additional exit lanes on each side... So the bridge is like a small city block. Then I cut between Studio A and the Commons... across to the far side of the campus, where I get to Studio C. Once in the building, I take the stairs to the fourth floor and get my coffee before heading into the lab.

Things are a little different in the lab. The teams have become adjusted to the new space. Every part and tool has found it's home. It's time for new developments; this is the story in the tech industry. Stay competitive... be adaptable... do what the lab needs you to do. This sometimes forces me to step slightly outside my Test Engineer role, but doubling as a part time Network Engineer... Software Architect... or miscellaneous grunt is something that just needs to be done from time to time. You just read a few articles about what you are trying to get done... find someone who can give you practical advice... get-r-done!

I came back at a time where several teams need a little help. All the new products that were put out this past year have created some interesting challenges, and new tests need to be run... test results from the summer need to be analyzed to make sure we learn from our failures and successes. My boss likes it when I can point out things we could have done better, and how to ensure it really gets done better next time. Even though that sometimes means making a plan for something we will never do again. That's just the nature of being on the bleeding edge. If one and three ideas pans out, we are making progress; However, if one and six pan out... well, it's epic... whether win or fail.

By the end of the day I'm usually beat. Half the time I can hardly make it through more than five or six minutes of lecture before I need to close my eyes and lean back. I open my eyes to find I'm back at the Renton Transit Center... I walk home... get Jaani... walk him for a mile or two... then get dinner and relax for another couple hours.

I spend from 07:30 to 18:30 away from the house. Which makes me feel really bad for Jaani. All alone for 11 hours a day... although, I need to go to work. Plus, I try to make it up to him on the weekends by not leaving him alone at all.

Anyway... That's the story with my work life right now. It's not bad. I get a sense of fulfillment form my work... a sense of greater being than just fending for myself in the wilderness... a sense of belonging somewhere that only comes from working with a great team of people.

So, that's all for now. It's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Later,

SteveO

Yooperland Vacation!

2011-09-01T19:49:00.000-07:00

So, I have been neglecting my blog again... I guess I have been up to a lot of stuff.

Jaani has been enjoying 3 walks a day in his own private 1.5 acre dog park... sometimes when the neighbors are around, I'll put him on a leash because I don't think they would like it if he went running up to them...

I have been spending a lot of time entertaining my nieces and nephews. They are all at the point where they want lots and lots of attention, so it's a good thing I'm here to give it to them.

I went to the renaissance festival where I enjoyed a turkey leg, a pickle, lots of beer, and a show at the smoker. Then we went to a near by bar for more beer and pizza. It was good to see my cousin the Amazing Flec perform his fire show at the smoker, although it was weird that there is no smoking in the smoker... at least not sense they passed that non-smoking law...

Next, I went around visiting old friends from high school... just dropping in and getting a beer at the local bars, but this past weekend, we went out for a Yooperland Adventure of sorts. (Jaani stayed with my parents...)

We went to Craig Lake which is just north of Michigamme, Michigan (which is in Michigan's upper peninsula SW of Marquette.) The way to the lake is to drive into Michigamme, where you will find a small one lane dirt road (craig lake rd)... take that road about 6 or 7 miles in (following the signs to craig lake)... then you will find a small parking lot... from there, you will have to carry your boat about 1/2 a mile down a dirt road to the water. From there, we traveled across the water for about 1.5 miles by boat (1 canoe, 1 kayak, 1 row boat)...

While there, we polished off about 168 beers, 5 fifths of liquor, and a half gallon of 5 o'clock vodka... we didn't bring much booze back with us... it was a good time.

Speaking of drinking... it seems that after spending a few weeks in Michigan, I find that I have greatly increased my capacity for alcohol. Funny how that works...

Anyway, now, I think I will spend the weekend going to East Lansing, Royal Oak, and possibly Duck Lake for another relaxing vacation.

Maybe I'll write more later, but that's all for now.

Later,

SteveO