Using Feature Flags to Manage App Updates with Rails and Mongoid

When you have a new feature for your web application, you frequently want to manage how it is rolled out. It’s always a good idea to only release the feature to a small group of customers as this will help you make sure that it is working as it should. Additionally, you can use feature flags […]

Handling 404’s Gracefully

You can spend countless hours working on your website, tuning and tweaking as much as you can. You can link check and scan and editorialize every page. But you will still get 404’s. It may be from typos in links from other sites. It may be from retiring or renaming a page. It may simply […]

Simulating Limited Bandwidth

Recently I was dealing with an issue where some JS ran fine locally, but not on a staging server. I tracked the problem down to a bandwidth issue – images loaded lightning fast locally but were slow on the staging server and that caused my problems. In order to solve the problem I needed to […]

Cross-Browser QA on Mobile

There are 3 main approaches to mobile QA: Use a physical device Use a local emulator Use a hosted service We’ll discuss all three options and then focus on the sorts of things that you should QA on a mobile device which are the same no matter which approach you take for a testing environment.

Cross-Browser QA on the Desktop

Now that we have determined what you should QA let’s talk about how you execute that QA on the Desktop. There are 2 main approaches to Desktop QA: Using a hosted service Using a local Virtual Machine (VM) I prefer using a VM because it’s always available and frequently it is easier to test local development, but […]

Surveying the Landscape – Part 1 in a Series on Cross Browser QA

Your website needs to work on many different browsers and to ensure that it works you need to make cross-browser QA a standard part of your process. This is the first of a multi-post series addressing how to setup cross-browser QA and make it as easy as possible so that you can easily integrate it with […]

5 Dead-Easy Things to do for a Better Mobile Website

There are many things you can do to make your website better for mobile (CSS3, SVG, Web fonts, CSS and JS minification). Here are 5 dead-easy things (each one should take no more than 10 minutes) that you can do today that will have an impact. 5. Let your “desktop” site be viewable on mobile […]

Effectively Testing API Calls with RSpec and VCR

When testing an integration with third party APIs it’s easy for tests to slow down and you might even start running into rate limits. The solution here is to use a gem like VCR (https://github.com/vcr/vcr) to cache the result of the API calls and replay them for subsequent tests. This is a good approach and […]

Always Be QA’ing – It’s a Process, not a Milestone

The web is not a static place. Pages and sites are being added and removed constantly. Services stop working. Your position and product or service focus changes over time. You need to account for this in your day-to-day processes. Yes, it is important to QA your website or web app before you launch, but you […]

How to debug JavaScript (or CSS) on Android

Last week, we looked at a contrived JavaScript issue on iOS to demonstrate how to debug it. Today, we’re going to take a similar look at Android. Please note, this technique will only work with Android 4.2 or above. Please see Additional Resources at the bottom for other versions of Android. 1. Install the ADB […]