Romain Pouclet

A long long time ago, in a galaxy country far away, a young student was doing his final group presentation. They’d built a multiplayer fighting game that would run on the Nintendo DS (it was a long time ago) and web/desktop using Flash (long long time ago!). On one of the presentation slide, they mentioned that they’d used an XML database to store games data, which one of the judge took interest in. That student was quick on his feet, so he replied that it was super convenient because you could just query data, get pre-formatted XML back and send it directly to the clients. That was me, I was that student and it was complete bullshit. We’d given up on using an XML database a long time ago and decided to go back to MySQL, I’d just forgotten to update the schema in our slides. This blogpost has nothing to do with XML, but I’ve used Postgres to store JSON data recently, and it made me think about this story. Anyway, let’s dig in.

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We got a few days of perfect blue sky and “I don’t need a jacket” temperatures, which means going out for walks (sure, whatever) and long bike rides (hell yeah, I’m never walking anywhere ever again). It’s not enough to compensate for, well, everything else going on in the world right now, but it’s something. It did feel good to get back to my routine after the aftermath of COVID last week.

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As part of a refactoring, I broke something that shouldn’t have broken (should it ever?). Fortunately, I caught this issue in my tests, but it took me on a stroll into Ktor’s and kotlinx’ serialization’s source code, which then got me thinking about expectations when related to “default” values in public API.

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Late once again, but for a valid yet upsetting reason: I got sick. Last Sunday, I gave you my heart my partner tested positive to COVID. I didn’t, but started developing the same symptoms the next day. I think it’s safe to say I caught it too. Monday and Tuesday were really bad, making it impossible for me to work, so we just spent the day resting, drinking fluids and worrying about the effects of long COVID. Fortunately, other things happened in those last 2 weeks.

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There’s always been something vulnerable about posting technical content (or, any content) online. You expose yourself to the possibility of being wrong and/or being judged. Because of that, I’ve spent a lot of time pondering if something was worth sharing at all, if that’s the kind of content people expected to see here… but I’m trying to move out of that way of thinking. With the strong possibility of coming up as naive about this project, I’ve decided to start writing my own web testing framework in Kotlin.

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