Debbie O’Brien –Senior Program Manager at Microsoft– joins Amal & Nick for a deep-dive on Playwright, an automation library for cross-browser end-to-end testing. Along the way, we learn why Microsoft decided to fork Puppeteer, Playwright’s unique value proposition, cool features like auto-waiting & the trace viewer, how it compares to Cypress & a lot more.

The reason we find ourselves as practitioners (as an industry as a whole) constantly migrating between different platforms, journeys, and digital transformations… We do this because I don’t think we ever understood the fundamentals.

John Ruble:

On any moderately-sized Node.js project you’ve likely already outgrown the package.json “scripts” section. But because the growth was gradual, with no single acute pain point, you might not have noticed. There’s a better way.

I’ve never been able to get into Makefiles, but many people I respect love them. For me the syntax is too arcane, but I recognize the power. If the “scripts” section of your package.json is getting unwieldy, it might be time for a make over. (yes I went there)

Simey de Klerk recenty dove head-first into our transcripts repo and coded up a super-cool feature that’s been on Jerod’s wishlist for awhile now. So, of course, we invited him Backstage to tell the tale!

Conor O’Neill:

I blame my life-long work obsession with automation and avoiding repetitive drudgery on my first boss and mentor Danny in S3. He was horrified to see me doing the same thing over and over in a VAX code editor and introduced me to the magical world of macros.

From that point onwards, I was a man on a mission to save us all as much time as possible in our working days.

From Yahoo! Pipes to IFTTT to Node-RED and beyond: this is quite the journey.

I created a GitHub action that auto-formats Changelog’s episode transcripts. Here’s how.

Ahmad Awais joins Amal, Amelia, and Jerod to discuss scripting, automation, and building CLIs with Node! We hear Ahmad’s back story, learn the ABC’s of mastering Node automation tooling, and share automation wins from all of our lives (and Twitter too).

In this post Arthur covers the core concepts, the question “Should you use GitHub Actions?”, and a step-by-step tutorial to build a functional CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions.

If you are already using GitHub to host your project’s source code, getting started with GitHub Actions is effortless. The fact that it integrates fully with the entire GitHub ecosystem means your team can double down on using the platform as a significant part of your software development process.

Overall, my opinion is that GitHub Actions is worth a try. Whether this is the automation system best suited for your team depends on your specific needs.

I love everything about this: the creativity, the engineering, the relentless desire to be as lazy as humanly possible. Chris automated 100% of this process, from content creation to social interactions to the sales pitch. A must-read.

n8n (a numeronym for “nodemation”) is a node-based workflow automation tool. The reason for the square quotes around “open source” is because it has a Commons Clause attached to its Apache 2.0 license, which means you can do anything you want with the source code except make money with it. Since n8n itself is built on open source tech such as TypeScript and Vue.js, this is a nice touch by the author in the FAQ:

As n8n itself depends on and uses a lot of other Open Source projects it is only fair and in our interest to also help them. So it is planed to contribute a certain percentage of revenue/profit every month to these projects. How much exactly is not decided yet.

Almost any slog can be turned into a do-nothing script. A do-nothing script is a script that encodes the instructions of a slog, encapsulating each step in a function. For the example procedure above, we could write the following do-nothing script:

On this week’s Homebrew episode, we discussed Mike’s script that automates the setup of a new Mac.

Listen to the show for an in-depth discussion on why he built it, the value of automating tasks you don’t do often, and to hear how Adam rolls with new machines. Or forget all that and click the headline link to check out Strap for yourself.