Happy to see this popping up here, I watched the Linux Tage talk last week. The demo just kept getting better and better, to a point where the audience just interruptively cheers and claps away. I know nothing about the contents, but this warmed my heart. True hacker project!
In IT school back in 2008 (with 14). I had absolutely no idea about the school or programming, I was just knowing my way around computers, so I signed up for it. We started with C and I remember the first couple of weeks and exercises just doing stuff with printf. Then reading user input with scanf. It clicked pretty early for me, and I loved it.
From there on I was always learning faster and more at home as a hobby, I was mostly ahead in school. A friend and classmate and I coded so many different projects during that time (2D terminal game, PHP forum, PHP CMS that was actually productive for a few years, thereby also learning how the internet worked).
It's just crazy how lucky I got to be interested in this thing at the right time. "Back then" I feel you got so much more time to learn something well, mostly because things weren't changing at crazy speed.
I'm trying to make localhosting (https://thelocalhostinger.dev/localhosting) a thing. It's about finding ways to strip away unnecessary complexity of selfhosting in very specific edge use cases.
I like to think of test coverage as a negative indicator, i.e. if coverage falls below some defined percentage, it's a bad sign. But it doesn't make sense to optimize for that metric, because, as you said, you can have 100% test coverage but every single test can be bad.
I've always wanted to spend some more time on mutation testing, which can be used to improve test quality instead of just focussing on quantity. But I found it to be completely irrelevant in the industry so far.
Interesting! It's nice to see people are experimenting with these, and I wonder if this kind of junk data generators will become its own product. Or maybe at least a feature/integration in existing software. I could see it going there.