US-RSE Software Testing Talk Series
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The Testing working group is happy to announce a new talk on Software Testing on Wednesday July 23, 2-3 PM EDT. Title: “Move Fast and Don’t Break Things: How testing enabled a total rewrite of critical infrastructure” Presenter: Ethan Holz
Abstract
When developing research infrastructure, the last thing people want is a breaking change, but this doesn’t mean we have to stop developing new features. However, making significant changes to production systems while maintaining reliability and user trust presents a fundamental challenge: How do you confidently transform your codebase without breaking existing workflows? In this talk, we will go over how I was able to completely rewrite the core of our cloud CI runners because of strong testing practice. We will walk through the initial implementation of the gha-runner codebase and its tests. Then we will showcase how those tests allowed for us to make our implementation cloud-agnostic and remove barriers when building for new cloud providers. Finally, we will go through how you can utilize tests to fearlessly refactor your codebases to keep delivering value to your developers.
Biography
Ethan Holz is a Research Software Engineer at the Open Molecular Software Foundation’s (OMSF) Ecosystem Infrastructure team. With a diverse background spanning development for low-access environments and the automotive industry, IT for healthcare, and specialized work in IoT deployment at scale, he brings a unique perspective to research software infrastructure challenges with tested and repeatable environments. At the OMSF, Ethan focuses on cloud infrastructure and developer tooling that supports computational chemistry with particular expertise in containerization, CI/CD systems, and building resilient and testable infrastructure. Ethan holds a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Virginia Tech where he got his start hacking on low-level systems. Today, Ethan loves building tools that help developers and scientists get things done! In his free time, Ethan enjoys finding a fantastic cup of coffee and hiking the great Colorado wilderness!
Registration details
To register follow this link: Testing Talk Series Registration