Steve Craig

### Day 15/50: Build with Confidence: Unit Test Crossplane Compositions Let's talk about something that's a huge pain when you're building those awesome custom platform APIs ("Compositions") we discussed back on Day 5. When you write a complex "Composition" (to be fair, they all look complicated at first), how can you be sure that I works as intended? 🎯 There is a much, much better way than a frustrating "apply and pray" feedback loop. It's the "crossplane render" command. This is a local-first "unit test" for your Compositions, and it's built right into the Crossplane project CLI. The best part? *It doesn't need a live Kubernetes cluster.* It uses your local Docker daemon to run the exact same Composition Functions (like "function-patch-and-transform") that your cluster would. You just feed it your local files: 1. A simple YAML of your custom resource (the XR [Composite Resource], like your "kind: Database"). 2. Your "Composition.yaml". 3. The "Function.yaml" (so it knows what Docker image to run). You run crossplane render xr.yaml composition.yaml function.yaml and it spits out the *exact* YAML manifests (your "Deployment", your "Secret", your "NetworkPolicy") that it will create. In an instant, you can see if your patches worked, if your template logic is correct, and if the final resources look exactly as you intended. You can iterate 10 times in a minute on your laptop instead of 10 times in an hour on a dev cluster. By the way: This is my go-to tool for preparing live demos (like for my talk at DevOps Meetup Zurich on Wednesday 😉). PS: This tool is also a lifesaver when you're *writing* your own custom Composition Functions in Go or Python! How are you creating Compositions right now? Are you using "render"? Let me know in the comments!

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Today’s DMEs at scale don’t have one or two integration requirements. They have dozens 👇 What providers need now is a scalable integration architecture… not a system that operates like a black box suck inside a walled garden. The companies that survive the next decade won’t be the ones relying on manual data entry and workarounds between disconnected systems. They’ll be the ones with the strongest integration layer. Flexible. Observable. API driven. Built to scale. Legacy got us here. It won’t take us forward. 🫡

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Yesterday we shipped the Context Engine Studio. A developer tool serving as a user interface over your existing workspace data. Clone it, point it at a workspace you provision yourself and get going. It runs on the same APIs you'd use to integrate Clinia Context Engine into your own stack. Working through Studio setup is basically a dry run for the real integration. Ingest patient data, chat with a sample agent grounded in their record and watch what the engine actually did to the data on the way in. Easy peasy! Oh and btw, we made it open-source. The code is public here: https://lnkd.in/ggrkJeg5 Enjoy! ✌🏻

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Several people know about this problem but nobody talks about how to solve it. I was asked one time to help fix this issue at a company. The fix lies in breaking the work down to a few critical steps. First, never just hand off work in its entirety and expect you'll get anything you can use. Regardless of how good or bad the team is, always ask, always, the offshore team to pseudo code their approach. They should explain which files they'll touch, which systems they'll touch, integrations, which areas or layers of the application, etc. I call this the first pass. Why is this important? This tells me they're thinking about the problem right and if there are any gaps in their understanding, or any pieces they're missing. After that, they'll do a second pass. That is stubbing out which functions or code will need to be added or modified, maybe even making the functions and service calls work but with mock data. This is the "prove it to me" moment. This second pass also helps me as a dev manager gauge how fast or slow the offshore team is working, giving me indications too if they're stuck somewhere. Only after this second pass, do I actually turn them loose to go execute and "deliver" the solution. Only now, because I did some diligence on my managerial end, I've got greater confidence that what I'll get will be something on par with what I'm expecting and can use. This partnership and collaborative arrangement also fosters trust and over time the offshore team will learn how your organization operates, critical thinking, and that nothing should ever be done in a vacuum or cowboy way. For more helpful tips like this, follow me. I'm paying it forward in 2026 and will be sharing gems most people aren't talk about with a focus on the solutions, not just problems.

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