My LinkedIn Year in Review - AI Style head to head matchup between Coauthor.Studio and Claude.ai.

Thank you, Vernon Richards for referencing Rewind.coauthor.studio ... I love the cute LinkedIn Rewind graphic it produced! I think it was worth the 99 cents.

The AI generated post it produced. though, it just didn't sound like me. Too long. Not chatty or informal enough. The phrasing was off as if instead of bullet points about my year it was trying to unfold a grand epic story that just wasn't there. Then, I then asked Claude.ai to edit the post it so it copied my writing style from the Media section of this blog ... and it was scary how similar to me it sounded!

I'll copy-and-paste the CoAuthor.studio and Claude.ai and put then in the post so people can compare the language.

Hey, a software tester's gotta test!

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjmaher1/

First Time Using GitHub CoPilot to Create a ReactNative LoginPage app. What Could Go Wrong?

Do you want to practice mobile test automation development but need a React Mobile app to test against? I have one for you: DetoxDemo, an open-source app with a Login screen, built with ReactNative + TypeScript + Mobile automation written in Detox.

The automated tests I coded myself, but the app is all GitHub CoPilot. This article is about how CoPilot stumbled, fell flat on its face, stumbled, fell again, took a breather, but eventually, after many failed attempts, limped across the finish line, creating exactly the React Native app I had been looking for.

 

Ten years ago, back when I was a newbie automation developer, I discovered a test site created by Dave Haefner: The-Internet, a website where newbie automation developers could practice their craft. Dave Haefner, the author of the Elemental Selenium newsletter and the Selenium Guidebook, two resources that really helped me out early in my career, created the site to help the software testing community.

To practice what I was learning on-the-job at my first automation development position putting together Selenium WebDriver + Java automation framework, I created, testing against that site, a toy project, Testing The-Internet and started blogging about it. I gave imaginary readers code walkthroughs how one could write a framework to test The-Internet’s Login Page. The act of being forced to explain what I am doing in various programming projects and why to imaginary readers has helped me in many parts of my career, whether it is playing around with REST Assured, setting up an Appium framework, or creating an automation framework with Ruby + Capybara.

Ten years later, to practice what I am learning at SELF ID, Inc. putting together an automation framework for their React Native mobile application using Wix’s Detox + TypeScript, I wanted to put together another toy project. Call it DetoxDemo. The problem was that, although I knew what the automation part would look like, I didn’t know of a React Native mobile application to test against. Wishing there was a React Native app like Dave Haefner’s The-Internet, I had a crazy idea:

Why not try to vibe-code a React Native mobile app, creating one with GitHub CoPilot, that emulates his The-Internet Login page?

Sure, there were some minor hurdles, the first being that I don’t know how to “vibe-code”. I’ve been using GitHub CoPilot for a year at two different workplaces, but nothing to this extent.

The second hurdle is that I am not a software developer. With React Native applications, I have been a manual and an automated tester. I just don’t know React Native development.

Creating an entire app using a toolset I am unfamiliar with in a language I don’t understand? What could go wrong?