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Drew Ayling
Staff Software Engineer @ Ford
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Drew's Rules to Deliver Value

· 4 min read
Drew Ayling
Staff Software Engineer @ Ford

I compiled this list after leaving a prominent DevOps company that I’ll keep anonymous. Observing their stagnant state for the entire year I was there, I was certain that my contributions wouldn’t be valuable to the company in the long run. Nevertheless, I did learn a few valuable lessons from their company practices and the areas where they fell short.

Templating your YAMLs and then some with ytt

· 2 min read
Drew Ayling
Staff Software Engineer @ Ford

When I first learned about yet I thought to myself, why on earth would you want to do something like add code-like comments to some YAML file, process it with some other YAML files, just to create a NEW YAML file? Well, the answer only became obvious when I began managing a software project that processed a lot of YAML. Just how much YAML? We'll get to that in a minute. But first…

Welcome

· One min read
Drew Ayling
Staff Software Engineer @ Ford

Welcome to my blog. I was using medium, but am beginning to port my content to this site.

8 Reasons Your Automation Engineers Loathe Your Test Management Tool

· 5 min read
Drew Ayling
Staff Software Engineer @ Ford

In the realm of automation and QA, where attempts at precision and efficiency reign supreme, there exists a shadowy feeling lurking beneath the glossy facade of your test case management tool. As a vulnerable automation engineer with a modest amount of experience, I am going to lay bare the unspoken resentments that are plaguing your automation teams around the pretty tool.

Must Know Tools For Any Python Developer

· 7 min read
Drew Ayling
Staff Software Engineer @ Ford

There are many great articles on python libraries, from machine learning with PyTorch or TensorFlow to using Jupyter and Pandas to show the air quality in Antwerp, making a chatbot with ChatGPT and requests to spam your ex, or the ten best python visualization tools besides matplotlib.

Instead, this is a simple list of must-know core development and workflow tools for any python developer, regardless of their field of focus, and my brief opinions and experiences with them. Python developers will see this list and say, yup, yup, yup and be done.

You can find a simple bulleted list of all tools with links at the bottom.

The perfect development pipeline doesn’t exist ... but I can imagine one

· 11 min read
Drew Ayling
Staff Software Engineer @ Ford

I have worked in various organizations with different software development pipelines as a software developer, automation engineer, test engineer, DevOps engineer, etc. In all that time, I have never seen a perfect pipeline. Now, all development pipelines have room for improvement, but I’ve never seen a genuinely bulletproof one with built-in metrics, complete and total automation, and fast feedback.