A small plug for TestLocally

The slack message read, “We fixed the redirects but it’s still broken, can someone look into this?”. Womp womp.

For nearly a decade, I helped fight the war against 404ing links on the MongoDB documentation. Thankfully, I wasn’t alone in this battle - the various docs content teams created an amazing number of redirects to avoid users finding themselves on the dread 404 page when switching between versions of docs, when a page was moved or URL changed, or when a page was deleted, and our friends on the SEO team were always happy to let us know when something had gone awry. 

There are many ways to create a redirect on your website, but we were using Amazon S3 object metadata. S3 object redirects can only be interpreted as 301/308 redirects by browsers (there’s no mechanism to specify a 302/307), so once your browser has visited that URL and cached the redirect, that browser will cache that redirect forever. No amount of clearing your cache will get rid of the routing… so, how is an erstwhile engineer supposed to check that they have, indeed, fixed the dodgy redirect after visiting the page?

Enter TestLocally! TestLocally is a service run by the fine folks at WonderProxy ^[1] that takes screenshots of websites from different locations around the world and is an incredibly easy way to see what’s going on in a fresh browser and through different CDN Points of Presence. When a colleague reported that they had fixed the redirect but it still appeared to be broken, even in private browsing or their secondary browser, I used TestLocally to confirm the redirect behavior and provide a stable link to demonstrate it: https://testlocal.ly/tests/66bf5ab5ab13b9b4c00a978d.

TestLocally is designed to quickly check that your localized applications are behaving correctly around the world, but it can also be helpful to check more generically and provide a stable link to share with stakeholders, executives, etc. If you want to demonstrate to an executive that an A/B test is, in fact, running, TestLocally is a great way to provide a quick and concrete example of what the test group was seeing. I’ve found it shockingly helpful to take a quick screenshot and be able to show my stakeholders what users around the world are seeing, for free!

TestLocally is proving to be an incredibly helpful and versatile tool. I’ve been using the free version because it’s all I needed, but I hear the paid version has lots of fancy useful features.