A request I’ve seen from Concourse users every so often is that they want a way for a Concourse Job to stop what it’s doing and wait for approval from a human. They want what I call a “manual approval” step in their jobs. A more concrete example that I’ve seen is when users are running terraform apply in their pipelines. They usually end up wanting a Concourse Job that looks like:

When I got my first mechanical keyboard one of the first thing I did was create a layer where h,j,k, and l, Vim’s navigation keys, sent their respective arrow key codes instead. This quickly became one of my favourite key bindings that I would use everywhere. I’ve continued to code this setup into any keyboard I can set it up on. With mechanical keyboards this is easy since most come with great programmable tools out of the box.

I’ve been reading So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. I first heard of this book a few years ago from a podcast and it’s been on my reading list ever since. I’ve entered a soul searching mode recently in regards to my career. I’m trying to figure out where I want my career to go. This is a pretty big question and I’ve been finding the advice in this book pretty good for someone in my position.

I’m reading TDD By Example by Kent Beck right now and one of the Red Bar Patterns really resonated with me. It’s called the Learning Test. Here’s the scenario. You have a new library or framework that you’re implementing. Instead of just diving into TDD’ing the implementation, you can write some learning tests. These are tests where you validate how you expect the 3rd party tool to work for you. I see this as testing the contract between your application and the 3rd party tool.