Plurrrr

I learned about socat a few years ago and am generally surprised more developers don’t know about it. Perhaps I appreciate it all the more since I saw it being used for the first time to fix a production issue, and these sort of incidents leave a lasting impression on one’s mind.

socat has a bit of a learning curve compared to tools such as netcat. While I still often use netcat and friends (in no small part due to muscle memory), socat truly is the Swiss Army Knife of network debugging tools.

Why parameterize tests?

1. It follows DRY(Do not Repeat Yourself) principle.
2. Changing and managing the tests are easier.
3. In a lesser number of lines, you can test the code. At work, for a small sub-module, the unit tests took 660 LoC. After parameterization, tests cover only 440 LoC.

Have you ever wondered what the weather was like, but not wondered enough to run some web app that takes 120 seconds to load a bunch of tracking javascript and ads, let alone actually go outside. In this post I'll show you what is in my opinion the best way to get your weather report. First though, we need some tools.