Category: Go

I didn’t spend as much time in 2025 working on my gift registry, so all I really have is a login flow and profile management. I am building out a test suite that seems to do a pretty good job of validating the code works (I’ve only had a couple of bugs the automated tests didn’t catch, but did after a quick update, and more than a few that the tests did catch) – mostly because I’m just running the code when I test. It’s a server-side rendered app, using Go’s html/template package, so validating the output has been more difficult than reading JSON data like you would in a traditional web app. I tried Playwright, and that was really handy, but also slower than I wanted, so I abandoned it¹, and wound up just writing a quick-and-dirty depth-first DOM search that does the validation that I really need, which wound up being a lot easier than I thought.

I’m very pro “just running the code” when it comes to testing software. But while just spinning up containers does actually “work” – in the sense that the test runs and completes without error. But you very quickly realize that’s clearly not how these things are supposed to work. I’ve been using testcontainers to test the gift registry app I’ve been working on, and it’s been great. I’ve implemented a basic passwordless login setup, and I can test every part of this using live code with the sole exception of actually sending an email via a simple make test. But this was very obviously not the best way to go about it, as you can see from the test output: