Thank you for supporting and encouraging me to push the envelope further.
NixBSD was already in great shape, I just wanted to add a little bit of polish and make it easier for people to consume. I hope that the demo may help get others interested and to get set up locally.
I would like to add support for additional kernels. I heard that NetBSD can also boot from ZFS, but I haven't worked out all the details yet. I might like to experiment with that some time.
I've also been keeping an eye on Cygwin support, and it would also be quite interesting to NixOS-ify ReactOS :p
While I agree with you that a lot of sub-par technical people are relegated to the role of QA, just because you haven't seen one proper QA person in your life, doesn't mean they don't exist.
Have you ever thought to ask if the company you're working for puts their money where their mouth is, when it comes to quality? If they did, how are these people getting hired in the first place? What responsibility falls on the engineers who interviewed these folks? Does your reporting structure reward people who raise problems, or punish them? Who do your QA people report to? And please don't say the head of development, who is responsible for deliverable dates.
The best QA people I've ever known had such a good grasp on the market and customer needs that they were, in fact, product managers. Sounds like you've probably had a similar experience.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. There's plenty to learn from Statistical Process Control and Deming, etc.
I've worked on more projects without a requirements specification, than with one. Without a competent PM, how will QA people even test? I guess they can intuit what the product actually needs to do, but then there's ambiguity. The reality is that someone (product) needs to document exactly what the product needs to do and how it must operate, in no uncertain terms. Even with a spec, it's often still quite ambiguous. I honestly see these problems as organizational, so when you slag on the QA folks, I get a little miffed.
I've caught plenty of bugs at review time, that could have been caught by some basic cursory testing on the developer's part. Mistakes happen. Even QA people make mistakes, we're all human after all. Does placing the blame directly on the QA people really help you? Imagine if you started asking questions about your development process, and where things could have gone wrong? The fish rots from the head, and often times bad practices are (explicitly or implicitly) rewarded by management, because they result in faster iterations, shorter delivery time, but something is definitely being lost here.
Sorry if my rant is slightly inflammatory, this is coming from a QA person who has seen a lot of these failures in practice, so I feel the need to defend the position a bit.
Hey vermaden, great article! I saw you had some problems with virt-manager, and I did too! There is a solution your problem:
> I was able to start FreeBSD 13.2 installation … but it got frozen at the kernel messages and nothing more happened.
If you notice at the bootloader screen, it says something like "5. Cons: Dual (Serial primary)"
Pressing the 5 key at the bootloader screen will toggle the output from "Serial primary" to "Video primary" or something to that effect. Once you toggle this setting, it should fix the output hanging and you should get a login prompt.
The other way to fix this problem, is through the virt-manager menu, you can simply switch the view from Graphical Console, to the Serial Console. Under View -> Consoles -> Serial 1
Hope this helps make your experience a little better under virt-manager.
Of course you are correct that supporting Twitter or any service is a moving target, so long as it changes. But that doesn't mean specific bugs can't be captured in a test case.
At one point, he deletes half the HTML file to isolate where in the site the problematic code is. In a way doing a kind of binary search. After a few iterations of this, he comes up with a very small case that exhibits the problem he's trying to solve.
It's clear he knows his way around the codebase and where to make changes, but isolating these test cases is probably as important. And presumably if you fixed enough of these issues (while following the specs), 99% of the modern web should work just fine.
Thank you for supporting and encouraging me to push the envelope further.
NixBSD was already in great shape, I just wanted to add a little bit of polish and make it easier for people to consume. I hope that the demo may help get others interested and to get set up locally.
I would like to add support for additional kernels. I heard that NetBSD can also boot from ZFS, but I haven't worked out all the details yet. I might like to experiment with that some time.
I've also been keeping an eye on Cygwin support, and it would also be quite interesting to NixOS-ify ReactOS :p