Happy new year everyone! For better or worse we’re now well into the 2020s.
Here are some things I’ve been doing recently.
A post on the GNOME openQA tests: Looking back to 2023 and forwards to 2024. I won’t repeat the post here, go read it and see what I hope to see in 2024 with regards to QA testing.
I’m still mentoring Dorothy and Tanjuate to work on the tests and we’re about at the half way point of the Outreachy internship. Our initial goal was to test GNOME’s accessibility features and this work is nearly done, hopefully we’ll be showing it off this week. Here’s a sneak preview of the new gnome_accessibility testsuite…
These features are sometimes forgotten (at least by me) and I hope this testsuite can serve as a good demo of what accessibility features GNOME has, in addition to guarding against regressions.
It’s hard work to remotely mentor 2 interns on top of 35hrs/wk customer work and various internal work duties, so it’s great that Codethink are covering my time as a mentor, and it also helps that it’s winter and the outside world is hidden behind clouds most of the time. If only it was a face-to-face internship and I could hang out in Uganda or Cameroon for a while. Tanju and Dorothy are great to work with, if you’re looking to hire QA engineers then I can give a good reference for both.
I expect my open source side project for 2024 will still be the GNOME openQA tests, it ties in with a lot of activity around GNOME OS and it feels like we are pushing through useful workflow improvements for all of GNOME. Not that I’ve lost interest in other important stuff like desktop search, music recommendations and playing OpenTTD, but there is only so much you can do with a couple of hours a week.
What else? As usual I’ve been reviewing various speedups and SPARQL improvements from Carlos Garnacho in the Tracker search engine. I’m making plans to go to FOSDEM, so hopefully will see you there (especially if you want to talk about openQA). And I listed out my top 5 albums of 2023 which you should go listen to before doing anything else.
Sam Thursfield 