Since my contract at my current company is coming up in the end of September, I started looking for a new gig this month. A few things were really important to me:

• Finding a job that had some upward mobility.
• Finding a job that had decent benefits
• Finding a job that didn’t really require me to go to an office every day.
• Finding a job that seemed appropriate for me (no Microsoft, yes Linux, yes Open Source, etc).

Before this, I did a few things to make my job search a little bit easier:

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As many of you know, I don’t make it a secret that I’m not an amazing front-end guy. However, since I have a mantra of “test all the things” that I’m working on, when I have to do front end work, it’s my goal to test everything.

I start by using sitespeed.io for testing the page load and performance times of my application. This is critical in ensuring that the code that I’m writing is performant, and doesn’t introduce any critical latency bugs to the application. I can integrate sitespeed.io into my gitlab workflows – which is super critical, as I can reject any builds that are not performant, and a video and screen shot of the home page (and any associated pages that I’m testing) are part of the artifacts created: this enables me to provide “page level diffs” showing the content on the page that has been changed. The one thing that Sitespeed cannot do, however, is testing functionality. You’re limited to grabbing pages via URL, and can’t pass data into forms for posting.

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If you haven’t used Gitlab’s Auto Devops product yet, and you’re in the DevOps or CI/CD space, you’re really missing out on the convenience that the Review App can bring. In order to get started, you’ll need a few things:

1. A Digital Ocean Account.
2. A little bit of working Knowledge about Digital Ocean’s Dashboard.
3. Be a Site Admin for GitLab
4. Some UNIX chops.

I’m going to assume that you have a GitLab instance up and running already. Setting this up is probably a bit outside of this article, but, I highly recommend the Omnibus installer for your sanity (and mine, honestly). Fortunately, you won’t need SSH access to your Gitlab instance, but you will need to be able to open a shell and do UNIX like things. I haven’t tested this on Windows, so, you’re on your own there.

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