After working as a Developer, Tech lead, and Architect for around 16 years, I am joining AtomicJar as a Developer Advocate. Here are a few reasons why I am so excited about this new role and specifically why I am joining AtomicJar.
1. Developer Happiness
We talk about Developer Productivity and various tools and techniques that could improve productivity all the time. In addition to productivity, I am very keen on Developer Happiness. I strongly believe that people do their best work when they are happy.
When I think about what are some of the pain-points that make developers unhappy and stressful, the following two things come to my mind.
- Many times we work on brown-field projects and not being in a position to say “does this tiny change break any other functionality?”
- Need to fix a high-priority production bug, but we don’t have an easier way to reproduce the problem before fixing it.
These are the 2 things I, (and I hope many others also), suffered the most while working with large codebases. When I think about how we can fix these problems, the solution is obviously having a TestSuite. But modern applications are using a wide range of services like databases, message brokers, NoSQL data stores, etc, and writing integration tests is a challenge.
That’s when I found Testcontainers which makes writing integration tests a breeze.
I like unit tests for verifying whether my units are working or not, but I care more about whether the whole system is working or not. To me integration tests give more confidence whether a feature is working as expected or not by talking to the real services(databases, queues etc) instead of mocks.
Once I started using Testcontainers it became a default testing library in my toolbox. With Testcontainers I can write integration tests so that it will be easier to know whether my tiny change is breaking any other functionality and also relatively easy to reproduce a production bug.
I love to share what I learned about Testcontainers with other developers and help them to build better quality software. I am glad that as a Developer Advocate this is one of my primary goals.
2. Ambitious Goals
Let’s accept the fact that the modern software development became more complex these days. In order to meet the complex application requirements such as high scalability, resiliency and fault-tolerance we are using wide range of tools and leveraging Cloud Computing capabilities. This is adding lot of complexity on developer environment setup and is asking for more beefy hardware.
Many innovative solutions are coming up to handle this problem such as Gitpod, Microsoft’s Codespaces etc. There is going to be more focus on Improving the Developer Experience in the coming years.
AtomicJar is solving a similar problem focusing on testing with Testcontainers Cloud by providing a cloud based environment to run containers so that developers can run their integration tests faster and more consistently. You can use Testcontainers Cloud on developer machines, CI environments and get faster feedback.
Cloud Platforms and DevOps/SRE principles are enabling organizations to build highly scalable and resilient systems. In order to speed up the feedback cycles organizations are adopting the “Shift Left” mindset where testing of the software will be done as early as possible. Testcontainers Cloud is a great enabler in moving towards “Shift Left” mindset because Testcontainers Cloud can help developers to test quickly and efficiently.
I truly believe Testcontainers Cloud is going to help developers in building better quality software and I want to be part of such an ambitious goal.
3. Awesome Team
I haven’t played chess for many years, but one thing that my chess teacher told me stuck with me forever.
Always play with a better player than you so that you will get better and reach their level sooner or later.
Having people from different backgrounds is key to building a safe and inclusive work environment. AtomicJar is a globally distributed company with people from many countries with different cultural backgrounds bringing different perspectives to the table.
I had been interacting with some of the folks at AtomicJar whom I respect a lot and I have been following their work in the open-source world for a long time. It’s truly an honor to work with such amazing and talented folks.
I am super pumped to work at AtomicJar and help developers across the globe in using Testcontainers and Testcontainers Cloud and build better quality software.
If you haven’t used Testcontainers yet, then I strongly recommend you to go to https://www.testcontainers.org/ and get a feel of how to write unit tests that run with real dependencies in a frictionless way using Testcontainers.
