Dummy Run: letting fictional users try your app first

Mon, 19 Oct 2026 22:00:00 +0100

Dummy Run is an open-source tool that lets AI act as your users and try your application before your customers do. It is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 licence. The name is British English for a trial run; here, the dummies do the running.

The problem #

Most teams now build a preview environment for every pull request. In principle, someone checks each preview before it is merged. In practice, that check is often brief, it follows the expected path, and it is done from a single account. Few people test as a user with restricted permissions, a different device or an unusual way of working, which is where many real problems appear.

My Code in the Arctic

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 15:00:00 +0100

I never thought my code would end up buried in the Arctic ice, preserved for a thousand years. But that’s exactly what happened when GitHub archived my open source contributions as part of their Arctic Code Vault project.

My code, frozen in time #

On February 2, 2020 (02/02/2020), GitHub captured a snapshot of all active public repositories and preserved that data in the Arctic Code Vault. The snapshot included:

Open Source on Joel Merrick

Dummy Run: letting fictional users try your app first

The problem #

My Code in the Arctic

My code, frozen in time #