DEV Community: ItsASine (Kayla)

Protractor is officially being sunset

ItsASine (Kayla) — Sat, 17 Apr 2021 17:14:40 +0000

Development will wrap up by the end of 2022, when they remove it from the Angular CLI and add warnings if it's force included in new Angular projects.

For more information, here's the whole thread on Github: Future of Angular E2E & Plans for Protractor #5502

I already moved my projects to wdio, but I guess this means no more putting off writing my Protractor blog posts 😅

Nevertheless, ItsASine Coded in 2021!

ItsASine (Kayla) — Wed, 03 Mar 2021 19:38:05 +0000

This thing I found that made me want to post a #shecoded this year

Image via Geeky Glam Gamer on Facebook

Image Source

If we are to survive as a species, it will be because we one day realize that every member of our society has something to offer and that the contributions of all of us working together will get us further than simply relying on manpower ever could have.

My most recent achievement was…

Information sessions with women looking to do a career change or start a career in tech!

I'm in a group called Tech Ladies and it's been super easy this past year to hop on a quick Zoom call and answer any questions about what it's like to be in tech regardless of where the other person physically is.

My vision for the near future

I'd love to see that as remote work and information opportunities flourish post-2020 it'll allow people of all backgrounds a chance to learn and grow as they want to. I'm from a town where it was very much the culture to stay there forever and your contribution to society was to raise the next generation. Anything other than that was deviance.

I'm really hoping anyone in that situation who doesn't want that now has the chance to use online learning and Zoom to get a feel for other options and work remotely if they don't want to or can't move closer to tech industries. I ended up moving to the city, but if I had stronger cultural and family ties to my home area, I don't think I would have. Now the infrastructure is in place to help move us forward.

Meetups and conferences and work being moved virtual allow for more chances to get people involved who have family care commitments or physical limitations. It's going to be awesome as the world sticks with being more accommodating for opportunities like that.

Guild Wars 2 SMS Bot [Entry]

ItsASine (Kayla) — Fri, 24 Apr 2020 13:29:38 +0000

What I built

Using Twilio’s Autopilot API, I made an SMS bot that integrates with the Guild Wars 2 API. Right now, the app leverages the GW2 API for checking the conversion rates for in-game currency conversion. Now that a proof of concept is up, though, it can be extended to do whatever the Guild Wars 2 API can do. I opted to have one reliable feature to demonstrate rather than have it do a bunch of things half well.

Demo Link

As it’s an SMS Bot, you can get to it by texting (724) 257-4486. The Flask app is hosted on free Heroku, so it may take a while to “wake up” at first, so here are some images:

Link to Code

ItsASine / GW2-SMS-Bot

Twilio Hackathon project for an SMS chatbot that does Guild Wars 2 currency exchange math

GW2-SMS-Bot

How It Works

This chatbot uses Python and Flask to connect the Twilio API with the Guild Wars 2 API. It's hosted on Heroku, and you can talk to it via SMS texting.

Features

In Twilio
- Greets the user and listens for additional commands
- If the user requests help, lists the currently implemented commands
- If the user says goodbye, sends the user a farewell message
- Listens for if the user wants to supply an api key
In Python
- Asks for an amount and type of currency and returns the amount in another currency (gold to gems, gems to gold)
- Accepts the API key and stores it for usage elsewhere (currently there's no integration with the Account api, so it is unused)

How To Use It

Text (724) 257-4486 😄

Demo

How To Make It

Requirements

Python3
- Package requirements can be installed with python -m pip install -r requirements.txt
A…

View on GitHub

https://github.com/ItsASine/GW2-SMS-Bot

How I built it

Technologies involved are:

Twilio Autopilot API for handling the chatting over SMS
Flask (Python) for the middle code between Twilio and Guild Wars 2
Heroku to host the Flask code
The Guild Wars 2 API to get in-game info

Out of that, the only thing I’ve worked with before was the Guild Wars 2 API, mainly to get stuff like guild messages to display. It was new doing anything interactive, using Heroku over Netlify, and working with Python outside of schoolwork.

Cool stuff:

Twilio’s documentation is fantastic. The quickstarts were straightforward to go off of, and the blog had a bunch of examples to get ideas and approaches.
Flask made spinning up a proof of concept efficient. The guts of the app didn’t take long at all to get into the right place.

Annoying stuff:

I don’t know if Twilio’s documentation had me spoiled, or I was too used to no-fuss apps, but trying to get an API hosted on Heroku was a pain. Their documentation was very detailed in some spots and then “Do the thing” in other spots. I feel like I spent this month mostly fighting the deployment rather than developing.
I have no clue how the GW2 API works, haha. I noticed that when doing the currency conversions between in-game gold and premium gems, my app has one rate, another app that I know hits that API has another rate, and the game itself has an even more different rate. Hopefully, this is just caching (and I would assume GW2 is as close to realtime as it gets, while a large site like GW2 Efficiency might do their own caching)

Additional Resources/Info

If you play Guild Wars 2 and want to request a feature, here are the APIs available:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:Main#Version_2_endpoints
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:2#Active_endpoints

Here are screenshots of the configuration in Twilio if you want to see behind the curtain a bit!

Nevertheless, Kayla Coded

ItsASine (Kayla) — Mon, 02 Mar 2020 20:12:47 +0000

I make sure to participate in #shecoded every year to share this gif:

Gif source

Equality in tech looks like…

Anything that would be provided is provided to all peoples equally.

Care products in one bathroom are also in the other. 1:1s offsite are available to all people. Time off is distributed equally. There are multiple ways of boosting morale.

These things sound like no brainers, but the actual act of doing them gets far greyer to the people in charge of an organization. Sanitary products in women's restrooms but not in men's and neutral/family restrooms. 1:1s between the same gender but not with the opposite because of the perception, which then disadvantages those who can't get facetime with management. Minimal maternity/paternity leave or offering it skewed because one gender is more nurturing or physically recovering (but that other partner needs to be around to help, too). Rewards are only after-hours happy hours, which means caregivers can't go or it ends up being very "tech bro", but you can't complain about a reward without being labeled as entitled.

There's always a reason against doing what would be equal, but it's never a good one.

I’m an expert at…

Hmmm... probably Protractor and Jasmine. Wrangling those frameworks into working because I have enough hours of practice to know their quirks. Knowing them well enough to know what to Google, at least. I don't know -- I don't really think about it.

My advice for allies to support self-identifying women and non-binary folks who code is...

People are people. There's no mythical solution to making sure you're behaving right for The Women or whatever group.

Yes, sanitary products are a great way to provide support for transfolk, but does Joe feel safe to take them?

Adding generous maternity leave can make HR feel good about supporting women in tech, but what about Jenny, who has no interest in having children, or Christine, who is so swamped at work that she takes only what's needed to physically recover and is on her phone the whole time?

Make sure you're including all your peers in everything. Ask if there's anything they'd like to see be changed about the place that you can help with. Be mindful you might have perceptions that are off; the fix for that is to get to know people you may have perceived wrong. Speak up if you see or hear someone being offbase. Be an ally.

Hi, I'm ItsASine (again)

ItsASine (Kayla) — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 02:00:34 +0000

Hi, I'm ItsASine

To commemorate my 3 year mark on dev.to, I'm actually going to start contributing content by starting a tech blog

Who I Am

I've been around DEV for a while — mostly bookmarking articles I'll never read, but otherwise, I keep to the comments
I have 5 years experience as a software test engineer
My normal testing stack is Selenium, Jasmine, and Protractor
I tend not to end single sentences with punctuation
I recently got a master's degree in applied mathematics
- or, I'm a certified mathemagician
I've overly planned how this will go so that I don't fizzle out after 3 posts
- It'll be more like 15 posts instead, starting with this one :D
I'm a DEV mod and tag mod of a bunch of things, so you may have seen me around acting like I'm official and stuff like a hall monitor

What to Expect

Most of my plans for posts revolve around acceptance testing, as that's where my professional experience is and that's somewhat underrepresented in tech blogs.

Some ideas I have:

Actual technical posts such as how to test a CSV's contents in Node or what the difference is between Protractor element selectors
Technical opinion posts, like best practices and how devs' tests differ from a QA's tests
Other components of testing a webapp, like using automation on a cloud service's devices

Right this second, all this is stored in Notion so I stay motivated and can write anywhere:

I'll be using Repl to show actual examples in Jasmine where things aren't Selenium/Protractor specific. I might use something like CodeSandbox for full running Selenium/Protractor examples, but I need to get that set up first. If anyone has any other suggestion for embedding a headed Node process somewhere, I'm all ears.

So yeah... just wanted to give a heads up that another QA blog is getting started. Follow me on DEV if you want to join the ride :D

How can a QA help out during Hacktoberfest?

ItsASine (Kayla) — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 16:22:15 +0000

I'm stuck at 3/4 (and willing to go over 4) but I can't think of a good way to utilize my skillset rather than just taking the good first-timer issues away from new devs.

My specific thoughts for me, but the question in the title can hold for any QA:

My day-to-day is in Jasmine, so I might be able to find a JS project and clean up unit tests, but most of my work is in feature verification. It's not really realistic to jump in out of nowhere and start writing end-to-end tests when you don't actually know what the requirements are or what a good regression suite to tie into CI would need to look like.

So what should a QA do to be most helpful during Hacktoberfest?

A QA walks into a bar...

ItsASine (Kayla) — Wed, 03 Jul 2019 18:55:44 +0000

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-514473420277694465-989'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=514473420277694465&theme=dark" }

I actually have a sticker of a beer labelled sfdeljknesv from back when StickerMule had a marketplace. In trying to find a picture of the sticker, I found this amazing shirt that I now need

Is it necessary to learn touch typing?

ItsASine (Kayla) — Sat, 18 May 2019 17:49:51 +0000

Like the kind taught in grade schools: no looking at the keys, full home row all the time.

And these things:

What is your favorite gif for celebrating powerful female and non-binary people?

ItsASine (Kayla) — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 21:06:55 +0000

Nevertheless, Kayla Coded

ItsASine (Kayla) — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 18:47:47 +0000

I continued to code in 2019 because...

Gif source. I highly encourage people to visit StarTrekGIFs as it is fantastic.

I deserve credit for...

Becoming a master of math

It may not be a tech degree, but it is an extension of my math BA, so woo more math! I like learning the fundementals and learning on the job.

I hope to see my tech community...

I want to see people just be people. Children taught in schools that every career field is viable, so that employers can just hire the best candidate.

I don't see iniciatives in the workplace as a way to help solve representation. While it's well and good to want to hire women as much as men, I personally hate to see women in tech groups formed to find ways to recruit more women. That further reinforces that men and women are split in the workplace (if I have to hear "why aren't you going to their meetings?" one more time...).

Instead, I wish there were more organizations fighting for representation in schools to encourage girls to see that there's more options than getting a "Mrs Degree" and being a stay at home parent. That was the only option known when I was in high school in 2010. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's still the culture at that school in 2019. I didn't need to see companies with stock photos of every shape and color of candidate -- I never would have even looked for those companies in the first place.

What domain registrar do you use?

ItsASine (Kayla) — Sun, 03 Mar 2019 16:11:51 +0000

Since .dev domains are a hot topic right now, what site do you buy your domains through?

I normally bought through Hover, but Gandi was allowing preregistering for .dev so I got one through them. Then Google Domains looked enticing to move everything to... As far as I can see, everyone does Whois Privacy these days, so I have no need to be tied to Hover other than their awesome UI.

Some hype about .dev:

Anyone planning to register a .dev domain? Yes it's live!

Shafar ・ Feb 20 '19 ・ 1 min read

#dev #domains #tlds

Go get your .dev domain!

David Ojeda ・ Feb 28 '19 ・ 1 min read

#dev #domain #portfolio

Which .dev domains have you registered so far?

Jonathan Irvin ・ Mar 3 '19 ・ 1 min read

#discuss

did you get your .dev domain?

DeChamp ・ Feb 28 '19 ・ 1 min read

#showdev #discuss #www #domain

(I'm at least hyped about .dev)

What do you find yourself searching for again and again?

ItsASine (Kayla) — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 04:38:15 +0000

For what is likely the 6th time, I Googled netlify multiple github repos custom domain. And for the 6th time, I've come across this purple link about setting up a redirects reference in the main repo.

Will I ever learn? Unlikely. Most of the battle is knowing how to find the answer. Since I've found this answer 6 times now, I'm getting pretty good at it. At least this time I logged in to StackOverflow to star the question and upvote it and its answer.

It seems most developers are frequently asking the internet how to exit vim, but what do you find yourself searching for again and again?

(Runner-up for me is git cherry-pick's documentation, because I don't trust myself to not screw up the syntax)