Building a test system worth patenting
Sometimes the right tool for continuous testing does not exist yet. So we built one — and it turned out novel enough to patent.
Stories
Field notes from real engagements
Short, concrete stories about the testing and tooling work behind WhileOne — the kind of problems we are called in to solve.
Mapping 40,000 dependencies inside a mainframe
How do you safely change a decades-old mainframe when no one can see how its 40,000 pieces connect? You build something that can.
Custom monitoring for a 20-hour data pipeline
When a daily data pipeline takes the better part of a day to run, you cannot afford to discover a break at the end of it.
Test environments on tap
A new logistics system, one shared test environment, and a whole team queuing for it. The fix: a database per tester — and a generator to fill it.
End-to-end tests that report live in Slack
An end-to-end test system where every run narrates itself in Slack: what is queued, what passed, how long it took — and where the evidence is.
My year in Palo Alto
The most educational year of my career: a stealth networking startup, the whole stack, and a lot of generous, exceptional people.
The musical, connected office bathroom
A worn lock indicator, a traffic light, a Raspberry Pi — and a small lesson in why playful engineering is good for a team.
The Friday-evening bike racks
A lot of bikes on the office floor, and one Friday evening with power tools. Not every improvement to an engineering organisation is software.
The outage alarm you could not ignore
A siren, a spinning red light, and a two-button acknowledge. When production breaks, the whole office should know — once.
The self-driving tiger tank (status: never finished)
An RC Tiger tank, an Xbox Kinect, a Raspberry Pi, and an office to navigate. Not every project ships — some just teach.
Metering the AI coding tools
AI coding assistants are the new power tools — and worth using deliberately. So I proxied an undocumented API and built a live quota meter for GitHub Copilot.
Two unknown devices on my wifi
Two unfamiliar devices on the home network. Packet capture on the router, forced reconnects, Wireshark — and a slightly embarrassing conclusion.
In the workshop right now
Projects in flight — each becomes a story when it ships.
- Smoke-aware ventilation — monitoring outdoor air for fire smoke and automatically adjusting a decentralized home ventilation system in response.
- Vigil — a local-first Android seizure-alerting system: watch to phone to observer devices, built to keep working when the network does not.
- Year wheel — an application for planning a year the way you actually think about it: as a circle.
- Request rightsizing — using a small local LLM to triage work so large models are only used when they earn their cost.
Want similar outcomes for your systems?
We can start with a focused discovery and propose a practical plan in plain language.
Talk to WhileOne