[Test Engineering Weekly] On programming practice, Harvard tips for your CV, the internals of JS and SQLite

Hello! It's Oleksandr Romanov here.

It's been a long time since I wrote the last digest. But exciting articles and tools appear every day). How to find time to read all this? And how to find time to try that fancy Playwright that everyone uses except me.

It is necessary to select and "consume" new information very carefully. So, I'd like to offer you a digest of the best articles on testing and engineering. As always — a mix of valuable and hardcore posts.

Best

• In the last episode of the "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" podcast, I mentioned the "Build your own X" repository. It's a real treasure for those engineers who have learned some programming language basics but need real-world problems to practice. This repository contains a lot of projects (clones) of well-known applications - blockchains, databases, bots, search engines, web servers - even small operating systems! You can look at something more interesting than a simple calculator or UI test :). And you can take an idea from here - and write your own project!
• And for those who learn Python - there is a fantastic book with many valuable projects for practice - Automate the Boring Stuff with Python. It is free - so you can take, read and build your own)

Testing

• For the upcoming Halloween, I offer you a small but scary story about a mistake that was very difficult to reproduce.
• For those who want to look a little into the world of security testing - Monika Krysiak gives a detailed overview of basic vulnerabilities (with examples). For beginners - extremely useful!
• Learned some programming? Need help determining where to make your first pull request? Nicola Lindgren offers some options for such open-source projects.
• Are you thinking of starting your testing blog? Need help figuring out where to start? I have a post for you on this topic.

Engineering

• For those who love Javascript and learning it, I have an excellent selection of articles about how some things work in JS: Event Loop, Hoisting, Generators, Promises, and Async/Await. And what is most important - there are a lot of code examples and schemes in each article! Very cool.
• One of the reasons why you can get rejected in an interview (especially in Western companies) is a poorly designed resume. The recruiter needs to learn about your skills and strengths very quickly. Otherwise, your CV will "collect dust" somewhere in the far corner of the hard drive. Let me share recommendations for creating a CV and cover letter from Harvard University. It is worth your attention.
• By the way, if you need to "clean up" your subscriptions on Twitter - this tool personally helped me a lot.
• For hardcore fans - here is another article about the inner workings of the SQLite database. This time - how the virtual machine works there.
• Gergely Orosz provides an easy and practical explanation of some basic concepts from the world of large distributed systems: Scaling, Durability, Sharding, Quorum, and others.

What am I reading now?

I'm reading more fiction this month. Mostly these are the works of Stephen King and Isaac Asimov. I try to read books exclusively in Ukrainian - I even bought many books in electronic format.

But I need to pay attention to technical literature too. The last books I read (some of which I started to read back in the summer):

• The Coding Career Handbook
• Steal This Computer Book

I have already chosen the next technical book to read: the new Self-Sovereign Identity: Decentralized Digital Identity and Verifiable Credentials.