Every 4 to 6 weeks my colleagues and I come to the office for a few days – for a “distributed” development team with members in the Rhine-Main area, in Berlin, and elsewhere it is good to sit around the same physical table every so often, instead of only communicating via Microsoft Teams (argl).

This week is another one of those, and today was the “hacking day”, a regular component of the team week, where we have the opportunity to consider aspects of our products beyond sprints and user stories, and to simply try things without any pressure in the background. I spent some time figuring out how to use pytest to test an application running on a remote virtual machine, by feeding it commands via the Secure Shell and having pytest analyse their output. This saves a whole lot of tedious typing. Quite interesting and probably useful for our products!