Dan Jones

If you’re like us, you’re constantly pushing out new features and improvements to your product, but with those updates and changes comes the inevitable risk of bugs. The best way to find and fix those bugs are your internal reporters and developers, but getting the whole team to report bugs into GitLab can be hard.

Whether it’s your copywriters on the lookout for wonky content, your QA testers that find a broken form, designers that spot a font size five times too big, or your customer support team receiving word that a billing issue is blocking customers from paying – reporters can take forever to send actionable feedback to developers, who in turn don’t always get the information they need to smash those bugs.

What a bug-reporting workflow usually looks like …

… for reporters

Because reporters aren’t always super tech-savvy, it can be tricky for them to share reports that are helpful for your developers. The process is long, complicated, and tracking down the crucial technical information isn’t always easy.

In most teams, reporting bugs into GitLab looks like this:

1. Find the bug.
2. Open screenshot tool, capture bug.
3. Open software to annotate screenshot, add comments.
4. Open and log into GitLab.
5. Select the correct project.
6. Create new issue.
7. Document the bug. (How exactly do I do this!?)
8. Add technical information. (What is this even?)
9. Attach screenshots.
10. And then finally: submit report.

That’s a whopping 10 steps to report even the smallest bugs.

And we didn’t even mention the super-fun scavenger hunt reporters have to go on to identify all of the environmental data developers need to even start thinking about fixing the bugs.

… for developers

Developers get feedback flying at them in all forms – emails, phone calls, sticky notes and screenshots.

They’re ready to gouge their eyes out because they can’t reproduce the reported bugs, because they’re not receiving actionable feedback from the get-go, and they don’t have time to investigate all the bug reports they receive.

So what can you do to make sure everyone can contribute?

Speed up workflow for reporters

We created Marker.io to speed up and simplify your team bug reporting. Now, those 10 steps are only three:

1. Capture and annotate screenshot of bug.
2. Send bug reports straight to your GitLab project.
3. Keep hunting for more bugs!

One real-life example is an issue we ran into with our pricing page a while back. During our QA process, we noticed a weird bug: the price for our Team Plan was mysteriously missing. Instead of using the lengthy process mentioned earlier in this post, we used Marker.io to quickly send feedback to our dev team and get the bug fixed in no time.

This is what reporting the issue with Marker.io looked like:

Now, not only is the process much faster, but you never have to leave your website, there is nothing to configure, and all the technical data the developers need is automatically captured by Marker.io.

Create actionable reports for your developers

Once a visual feedback tool like Marker.io is introduced into the equation your developers can choose where they receive feedback, down to the specific bug-tracking GitLab project, and the important technical data they need is automatically grabbed and included in every bug report.

That means environment data, including:

• Browser
• Operating system (OS) and version
• Screen size
• Zoom level
• Pixel ratio

Here’s an example of what a Marker.io bug report looks like in GitLab:

This GitLab issue has all the information needed for your developers to act on it:

• The issue is in the correct project.
• Any pre-set epics, milestones or labels are included.
• The issue is assigned to a team member.
• The annotated screenshot is attached.
• The expected and actual results are well documented.
• The steps to reproduce are detailed.
• The technical environment information is all there.
• The issue has the URL where the screenshot was captured.
• The issue has a due date.

No more wasted time following up with reporters to fill in the gaps. It’s all there, organized directly in your chosen GitLab project – complete with everything vital to fix your bugs.

Want to try for yourself? Marker.io comes with a free 15-day trial. Give it go ➡️ Marker.io/gitlab

About the guest author

Marie Hargitt is the Marketing Manager of Marker.io, a powerful tool that makes bug reporting and visual feedback easy for the whole team.

Avi Steinberg reports for the NY Times Magazine on a new Biblical translation by Robert Alter; there’s a lot of interesting stuff, so I’ll quote a couple of chunks and send you to the link for more:

Alter told me about his decision to reject one of the oldest traditions in English translation and remove the word “soul” from the text. That word, which translates the Hebrew word nefesh, has been a favorite in English-language Bibles since the 1611 King James Version. But consider the Book of Jonah 2:6 in which Jonah, caught in the depths of a giant fish’s gut, sings about the terror of near-death by water. According to the King James Version, Jonah says that the Mediterranean waters “compassed me about, even to the soul” — or nefesh. The problem with this “soul,” for Alter, is its Christian connotations of an incorporeal and immortal being, the dualism of the soul apart from the body. Nefesh, to the contrary, suggests the material, mortal parts, the things that make us alive on this earth. The body.

“Well,” Alter said, speaking in the unrushed, amused tone of a veteran footnoter. “That Hebrew word, nefesh, can mean many things. It can be ‘breath’ or ‘life-breath.’ It can mean ‘throat’ or ‘neck’ or ‘gullet.’ Sometimes it can suggest ‘blood.’ It can mean ‘person’ or even a ‘dead person,’ ‘corpse.’ Or it can be ‘appetite’ or something more general: ‘life’ or even ‘the essential self.’ But it’s not quite ‘soul.’ ”

But, I asked Alter, doesn’t “soul” help dramatize the scene’s intense emotion? I mentioned another instance of the word nefesh, the terrifyingly evocative line from the King James’ translation of Psalm 69: “For the waters are come in unto my soul.”

“Oh, yes,” Alter said, with a smile. “That one does have a certain emotional resonance to it. But it’s not what the poet had in mind. And, I would add that the line ‘for the waters have come up to my neck’ … is also rather dramatic.”

Later I looked up the Jonah verse and saw that Alter’s translation was true to the poem’s formal structure. The verse starts with Jonah’s declaring that water had reached his nefesh — his “neck,” as Alter had it — and ends with his exclaiming that his head had been covered with seaweed. Biblical poetry is often made up of line pairings composed of analogous images, and Alter had chosen an anatomical noun, “neck,” that logically matched “head” in the parallel clause. You don’t need to know Hebrew etymology to see that “soul” doesn’t fit the analogy. The poetic structure dictates its own logic. […]

Alter was born in the Bronx and grew up in Albany, to working-class parents who emigrated from Lithuania and Romania. His father was born in the waning years of the 19th century and fought as a teenager in World War I. In that war, Alter told me, his father experienced “some kind of shell shock that wiped out his first two languages,” Yiddish and Romanian, leaving him to speak, as Alter put it, “a very salty American.” His father’s successful taxi-fleet business failed during the Depression; when the war started, he got a job at a tank factory in Schenectady, and the family left the Bronx.

Alter came to Hebrew, like many an American Jewish child, somewhat haphazardly — first in traditional contexts, like bar mitzvah lessons but also in Hebrew-only summer camps of the period. The cultural record of American Jews, in literature and art, can be summarized as a collective complaint against parental demands to learn Hebrew, but Alter took to it immediately and chose to continue his studies, even while playing varsity football and running track. As a young man, Alter was so enamored with the language that he spent much of his time systematically mastering a Hebrew-Hebrew dictionary. “I figured if I could get everything from that book into my head, I’d have it,” Alter said. […]

Alter regularly composes phrases that sound strange in English, in part because they carry hints of ancient Hebrew within them. The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, whom Alter has cited, describes translations that “foreignize,” or openly signal that a translated text was originally written in another language, and those that “domesticate,” or render invisible the original language. According to Venuti, a “foreignized” translation “seeks to register linguistic and cultural differences.” Alter maintains that his translation of the Bible borrows from the idea of “foreignizing,” and this approach generates unexpected and even radical urgency, particularly in passages that might seem familiar.

Here is Alter’s version of the well-known opening of Genesis 21, part of the story of Isaac, the miracle baby of 90-year-old Sarah, and her 99-year-old husband, Abraham: “And the Lord singled out Sarah.” The word Alter is translating as “singled out” is pakad. The King James, and most others after it, translate it as “visited.” The Jewish Publication Society has it as “remembered.” Others translate it as “kept his word,” “took note of,” “was gracious to,” “was attentive to” or “blessed.” A good literal version, provided by the canny contemporary translator Everett Fox, has it as “took account of” — and there is something numerical and even administrative about pakad. (Elsewhere in the Bible, in the context of describing a public census, pakad means “to number”; in modern Hebrew, it is related to the words for “officer,” “clerk” and “roll-call.”) Weaving together its numerical dimensions with a thread of bureaucratic banality, Alter yields the anxious verb “singled out” and with it, reveals new layers of tension in this story.

He goes on to discuss Alter’s version of Sarah’s reaction (the King James Version has “God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me”; Alter has “Laughter has God made me,/Whoever hears will laugh at me”). I’m sure no one will agree with all of Alter’s choices, but I like the way he thinks about translating. (Thanks, Eric!)

Texts From Superheroes

Manish Singh, reporting for VentureBeat:

Netflix is further distancing itself from Apple’s iTunes tax bracket. Earlier this year, the streaming giant enabled iOS users in more than two dozen markets to bypass the iTunes payment method as part of an experiment. The company now tells VentureBeat that it has concluded the experiment and has incorporated the change globally.

“We no longer support iTunes as a method of payment for new members,” a Netflix spokesperson told VentureBeat. Existing members, however, can continue to use iTunes as a method of payment, the spokesperson added.

This is a big deal. Netflix is the top-grossing app in the App Store in the U.S. They might remain the top-grossing app, even, because users who have already signed up with iTunes billing can keep doing so. But it really tells you how fractious Apple’s relationship is with content providers if the most successful one on the platform stops supporting it. And keep in mind that Netflix has long had a special relationship with Apple, with an 85/15 cut from the start, not just after a year.

If Apple wants to insist on a cut of in-app purchased subscription revenue, that’s their prerogative. What gets me, though, are the rules that prevent apps that eschew in-app purchases from telling users in plain language how to actually pay. Not only is Netflix not allowed to link to their website, they can’t even tell the user they need to go to netflix.com to sign up. This screen from the current version of Netflix for iPad is as close as they get, and I’ll bet it was the result of tense negotiations with Apple. Again, Apple can make the rules — it’s their platform. But it’s just wrong that one of the rules is that apps aren’t allowed to explain the rules to users.

Apple should be earning its share of in-app subscription revenue by competing on convenience, not confusion and obfuscation.

Oh, and that “Help” button up in the corner of the Netflix launch screen is interesting. Tap that button and you get the option to call Netflix customer support (over some VOIP system, not a real phone call). I tried that, was told the queue was “about 6 minutes”, and exactly 6 minutes and 11 seconds later I was speaking to a friendly support rep. I told him I was using the iPad app and trying to sign up, but couldn’t figure out how.

He told me I need to go to netflix.com in my browser.

The Monty Python comedy clan skewers King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table as they quest far and wide for the Holy Grail.

The trailer for Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, a feature-length special premiering tomorrow (12/28) on Netflix:

In 1984, a young programmer begins to question reality as he adapts a sprawling fantasy novel into a video game and soon faces a mind-mangling challenge. Welcome back.

What if Stranger Things but Black Mirror?

Update: There were rumors that an upcoming Black Mirror episode would feature a Choose Your Own Adventure style narrative. Well, it appears that Bandersnatch is that episode. From Variety:

“Bandersnatch” comes with five possible endings. Viewers who choose the quickest path, and decide against any do-overs, can make it through the film in around 40 minutes. The average viewing time is around 90 minutes.

Altogether, there are over a trillion unique permutations of the story. However, this also includes relatively simple iterations that don’t necessarily alter the story itself. For instance, one of the first decisions is helping Stefan to choose which cereal to eat in the morning. “We want [viewers] to have a successful choice early on,” said Engelbrecht.

The opening line of Madeline Miller’s Circe is: “When I was born, the name for what I was did not exist.” In Miller’s telling of the mythological story, Circe was the daughter of a Titan and a sea nymph (a lesser deity born of two Titans). Yes, she was an immortal deity but lacked the powers and bearing of a god or a nymph, making her seem unnervingly human. Not knowing what to make of her and for their own safety, the Titans and Olympic gods agreed to banish her forever to an island.

Here’s a photograph of a woman who could also claim “when I was born, the name for what I was did not exist”:

The previous line contains two lies: this is not a photograph and that’s not a real person. It’s an image generated by an AI program developed by researchers at NVIDIA capable of borrowing styles from two actual photographs of real people to produce an infinite number of fake but human-like & photograph-like images.

We propose an alternative generator architecture for generative adversarial networks, borrowing from style transfer literature. The new architecture leads to an automatically learned, unsupervised separation of high-level attributes (e.g., pose and identity when trained on human faces) and stochastic variation in the generated images (e.g., freckles, hair), and it enables intuitive, scale-specific control of the synthesis.

The video offers a good look at how this works, with realistic facial features that you can change with a slider, like adjusting the volume on your stereo.

Photographs that aren’t photographs and people that aren’t people, born of a self-learning machine developed by humans. We’ll want to trust these images because they look so real, especially once they start moving and talking. I wonder…will we soon seek to banish them for our own safety as the gods banished Circe?

The tradition of fans recutting trailers and clips of movies and TV shows into different genres — like Toy Story as a horror film and The Shining as a romantic comedy — has been around almost as long as YouTube itself. But I think this trailer by 20th Century Fox is the first official effort I’ve seen. Die Hard has become an unlikely holiday favorite so I guess they figured, hey, let’s put out a trailer that explicitly recasts the it as a Christmas film. Merry Christmas Hans!

Take a look at these black and white looping animated GIFs by Étienne Jacob. I would have posted these sooner, but those undulating stripes basically hypnotized me for three days and… woo, where was I? (via colossal)

If you’re an existing Google Fi (formerly known as Project Fi) customer, the MVNO has a special gift for you.

In light of the holidays, Google Fi published a lighthearted poem to look back on all the milestones the wireless option reached. That includes the new branding, supporting even more devices, and much more. But, the best news from the poem is the fact you can win yourself a nice prize if you’ve got some time to kill and don’t mind playing a game in your browser window.

Head over to this link and hit the space bar on your keyboard to get started. You’ll then be tasked with controlling a T-Rex and jumping over some festive vegetation. Once you finish you’ll sign in with your Fi account to claim your prize. In this case, that’s a Google Photos photo book at no additional cost.

It’s a nice little touch to close out a busy 2018. Are you going to get yourself a free photo book?

Reindeer Farts Cotton Candy – Celebrate Christmas with one of the sweetest treats of all, Reindeer Farts Peppermint Cotton Candy! Just grab one or two or even handfuls and savor the best part of an epic stocking stuffer.

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No Bathroom is complete without the new Thor Toilet Paper Holder! This Mjoinir Paper holder will be the talk of the neighborhood.

 The Hammer of Thor comes with 3 choices of phrases! You can mount it on the wall with the included mounting slots or set it anywhere!

Option 1. “WHOEVER SITS HERE AND HOLDS THIS HAMMER SHALL POSESS THE POWER OF THOR”

Option 2. “WHOEVER SHITS HERE AND HOLDS THIS HAMMER SHALL POSESS THE POWER OF THOR”

Option 3. “WHOEVER SHITS HERE AND HOLDS THIS HAMMER SHALL FART LIKE… THOR”

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