Living Museum of Learning
The Fake Mathematician Gets Her Page
Rhea Chu had already become a rather unusual member of our Mathematicians wing.
Her JSON existed.
Her portrait existed.
The exporter had put her into the gallery.
And on localhost, her individual page worked perfectly.
But there was one small problem.
When I opened the production museum and clicked on Rhea, I got:
404 — Page Not Found. 😂
The fake mathematician had made it into the gallery, but her page had not made it to the world.
We realized that the exporters were working, but the normal MuseCoreStudio publishing pipeline wasn't calling them.
So we added the Mathematicians exporters to the real Publish operation.
Now a normal museum publish would do more than publish exhibits.
It would also regenerate the Mathematicians gallery and all of the individual mathematician pages.
There was only one way to find out if it really worked.
Publish something normal.
So the fake mathematician became our integration test.
Rhea's JSON →
Mathematicians gallery →
Rhea's individual page →
MuseCoreStudio Publish →
Git →
website deployment →
the world.
A tiny publishing bug had turned Rhea into the first mathematician to travel through the entire new pipeline.
She wasn't a real mathematician.
But she was a very real test.
And this exhibit is staying in the museum. 😂
A system is not finished when each component works independently.
The gallery exporter worked.
The individual-page exporter worked.
The localhost website worked.
But the production system still failed because the pieces had not yet been connected.
Integration is where separate working parts become one working system.
And sometimes the best integration test is not an artificial test case.
Sometimes it is a fake mathematician with a photo of a little girl on a train. 😂