Following an extended period of testing of an enterprise application and its suite of transactional emails, I’ve written my own software sandbox for capturing outgoing emails for testing.

MockSMTP provides an SMTP server to which an application under test can send email messages without them escaping to the outside world. It also includes a simple web interface to list all received emails and to view each email’s headers, body, and attachments. The entire tool is self-contained, making it useful for stand-alone environments or for including in your own testing pipelines.

It’s completely free and open-source, so feel free to give it a try!

https://github.com/aarongnielsen/MockSMTP

I love the term “hype-driven development”, which I was reading about today (linked from Slashdot). It’s a tribute to those who have spent years honing and perfecting software development practices, and a much-needed wake-up call to those who have come after, have paid little more than a cursory glance to what is known to work, and still think they know better.

The “good” news is that it’s easy to get swept up in hype-driven development and to apply it to your own projects.
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You might be seeing ads at the moment for something called Don’t Change My Interchange. The idea is to increase awareness that the Reserve Bank of Australia is calling for stricter regulations on bank interchange fees – that is, the fees that banks charge each other to transfer your money.

Don’t sign their petition.

Why not?

I have started a new blog on WordPress. It also means I can finally point my domain name at my own site.

My old BlogSpot content is still available there: I couldn’t be bothered migrating the whole thing. There won’t be any new articles there, though – not that there have been any for a while, but one lives in hope.