I think this is far more common than one would hope. There are many senior developers out there who got their experience in a different time, when test coverage wasn’t important in many businesses. Writing test code is hard and it might be that your teammate simply don’t know how to do it.
If the tests aren’t there at approval time, they will never be there. I think it is perfectly fine to block approval, especially since you all agreed on it.
Solr is a great search engine. It won’t help you with the crawling, but if you manage to get the data into Solr you have a come far.
I drove to the Swedish province Värmland (known for fostering quite a few rally drivers). During the drive to get there, I could see how the ETA ticked down a few minutes every hour. While driving in Värmland, it was the opposite. The ETA ticked up, even while speeding a little.
You could fill the report with loads of sensitive personal information and then report them…
Not growth for economy, but for reaching critical mass in niches.
In Sweden (and perhaps all of EU?) it is not allowed to say “no x” if there’s normally no “x” in that type of product, e.g glutenfree butter.