luke.whiteley.io

tdl: Test Driven Lighting

N.B. This post has lived on my machine as a draft for 5 (five!) years. It doesn’t really say a great deal; I’m publishing it, more than anything else, in commemoration of my 15 minutes of LinkedIn fame.

It took no less than a week of COVID-19 lockdown for me to deteriorate to a point where Gradle’s plugin architecture began to look interesting. Failed builds are my thing and I had recently come into possession of some Philips Hue bulbs (free with a television, no Yorkshireman pays that much for a bulb) so I ventured to a herebefore unexplored frontier: the intersection of Gradle plugins and smart home technology.

Docs around hooking into the TestListener were quite poor but after a bit of digging I found the code reasonably easy to grok and the Gradle lifecycle itself fairly intuitive. The plugin is mainly a thin wrapper around the ‘yetanotherhueapi’ library so there’s little point giving a play-by-play, here’s the link:

https://github.com/lawhiteley/tdl

Much more interesting was the response to my short demo of the plugin in action, garnering over 2,000 reactions on LinkedIn:

and making it to the top of /r/ProgrammerHumor for a day or two:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/fmmf3w/selfisolation_day_3_builds_are_now_hooked_up_to/

Wild.

#gradle #hue #iot #procrastination