Author: Alan Page

Here’s what I found interesting this week:

• I’ve been thinking a lot about change recently – and I’m reminded of this quote from Peter Drucker:
  The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence – it is to act with yesterday’s logic 
• I’m big on change models – and while I’ve known about it for some time, I’ve been finding a lot of value in the ADKAR model from Prosci a lot recently.
• Not sure why I didn’t know about this before, but this model on agile fluency hits a lot of the right buttons for me.
• Yet another article on manager readmes with even more readmes!
• I absolutely love the world cup. My prediction (as mentioned last time) is blown, as Germany failed to advance. But – I’m quite happy to see Japan advance. Especially interesting is that they are the first team ever to advance on the fair play rule.

A few points of interest from my week.

• My quote to ponder is from Jerry Weinberg – “Unless and until all members of a team have a common understanding of the problem, attempts to solve the problem are just so much wasted energy.”
  Take a moment to reflect how often you’ve seen this yourself firsthand.
• I’ll also share five-quotes-in-one from this Forbes article on 5 Quotes That Teach You Everything You Need To Know About Leadership Storytelling.
• For a variety of reasons, I’ve been revisiting the posts from Roy Osherove on 5Whys.com – most of the posts are years old, but most are also still relevant and worth reading.
• Apparently, it’s webinar season.
  • Next Tuesday, I’ll be part of a panel at the Online Testing Conference
  • I’ll also be part of a panel at the Testing Guild Conference next Wednesday
  • Finally, I’ll be co-presenting a webinar on Continuous Testing with Eran Kinsbruner of Perfecto Mobile.
• I had a chance to talk with the CTO of Wevo this week – I think the concept of the company is fantastic (using ML to predict better design), and I think they’re a company to watch.

I’m back from a quick trip to New York City where I managed to give two workshops and a keynote without boring anyone to death. Here are five of the things I found interesting between talking, working, and learning.

• A lot of news recently about depression and its long impact has put this quote from Henry Rollins in my head. “I’ll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.”
• To me, good retrospectives and learning are critical to software (and team) success. I found Retromat this week – a site that gives you random activities to help you get more from your retrospectives.
• The Engineering Manager has an alternate view on The Manager Readme. I admit that I like the directness and brevity of the readme he eventually came up with, but also feel that the author missed a large part of the point.
• This list of Falsehood Programmers Believe About Hiring is painfully true, and something to ponder for any of us in charge of hiring.
• For the first time in quite a while, I’m reading fiction – science fiction to be exact. I’m reading Leviathan Wakes – the first book in the Expanse series. I watched the first season of the TV series, and liked it a lot – but I’m enjoying the book even more.

Some interesting bits from the week

• I took a pause on reading Why We Sleep (great content, not my favorite writing), but will continue to plow through it between more readable books.
  I’ve moved on to something I bought a while back, but finally just started – Accelerate, by Forsgren, Humble, and Kim. I’m fifty pages in, and enjoying it a lot. It ties into the Modern Testing Principle #2 pretty well so far.
• A bit related to sleep – but a whole lot more, is this article on Killing the Eight Hour Workday.
• Amber Race did a wonderful thing and combined The Big List of Naughty Strings with Postman tests (and wrote about it)
• I met Constance Armitage in Brighton earlier this year, where she taught me a bit about drawing. She drew a wonderful comic describing her experience at Testbash
• Finally, in case you missed it, you should know about the I’m a Teapot error on npm last week.

I thought it would be worth writing this up and sharing.

Last week was, for me, at least, time for another Windows update. With this one, my mouse stopped working – or to be clear, it started becoming unusable. The x coordinate speed was 1/3 of what it should be. With three monitors, it was pretty painful. I was also frustrated that the update reset some of my settings, pinned items to my taskbar without asking me, re-enabled disabled services, and basically did too much stuff that I thought it shouldn’t do.

So I gave up.

Most of my work is / can be done in a web browser. There are a few exceptions (more on these later), but I was willing to try something new. So, I installed Ubuntu 18.04, and for the past week, have been using it as my main home machine (also note I’ve been working from home 4-6 hours a day since then).

So far, it’s been nearly perfect. Of course, all of the browser apps I use daily (jira, gmail, google suite, etc.) work perfectly. I was also quite happy to see that just about all of the native apps I use have versions that run on Ubuntu (like Audacity, Slack, Spotify, and Zoom). With a bit of finagling, I was even able to get Open VPN working so I can access Unity resources. Overall, the app experience has been perfect for me.

Hardware support is also good (or great, with one exception noted below). I believe the Ubuntu installation queries my windows installation for some hardware, as it detected the wacom tablet I have that is not currently plugged in – but everything that I do use (bluetooth headphones, audio, logitech camera) work perfectly.

The ONE annoyance remaining is that once a day or so, I’ll lose a monitor. I have a Geforce 1060 driving three 24″ monitors. The card is (obviously) capable of driving all three, but once a day, one will drop, and no longer be detected by the OS. I’ve tried forcing it via tools (xrandr), but nothing short of a reboot brings it back. This behavior happened with both the nouveau drivers, and the latest generic drivers from nvidia. I’ll see over time how much this happens and how much this bothers me.

I built this machine for games, but I’ve drifted back to doing most of my gaming on Xbox, so I think it will continue to work out, but will be interesting to see if Ubuntu works out as a daily machine for the long term.

 

Wow – where did that week go? Here are few things I found worth pondering this week.

• There will be a full blog post with details, but I had one too many pieces of hardware fail after an ill-timed Windows update, and a few too many settings changes after the same, and I flipped out a bit.
  The good news is that I was able to get everything I needed to run in order to do my job running on Ubuntu in only a few hours.
• I’m giving a presentation to a small group of peers next week on data analysis, and I’m reminded of this quote by Josh Wills at Slack.
  “Data Scientist (n.): Person who is better at statistics than any software engineer and better at software engineering than any statistician.”
• Yet another great post from Michael Lopp on professional growth – Your Professional Growth Questionnaire
• I’ve mentioned Radical Candor here before, but this is a great post on giving feedback – A Manager’s Guide for Effectively Giving Feedback
• It’s GDPR day. I won’t hyperlink GDPR, but I will give you a link to The GDPR Hall of Shame

Five things on my mind – or interesting this week:

• I recently re-read a chunk of The Lean Startup, and highlighted yet-another-quote-about-failure-and-learning.
  “When blame inevitably arises, the most senior people in the room should repeat this mantra: if a mistake happens, shame on us for making it so easy to make that mistake.” — Eric Ries
• …which leads well into this article (it’s from last month, but I just found it this week), on what it really means to Go Fast and Break Things.
•  I tweeted to my web provider last week about getting free SSL (they currently charge a minimum of $8 a month for SSL on angryeasel.com). The bot(?)-driven replies and emails leads me to believe that web hosting is a highly competitive market. Overall, it looks like I can save a few bucks a month AND get ssl up and running. So far, leading contenders are Interserver and Chemicloud. I am, of course, open to other options (needs are hosting of two wordpress sites, domain email, and at least 10GB of storage.
• It’s almost World Cup time, and it was interesting to see that a simulation done by UBS predicted that Germany would win (they’re probably right), but more interestingly, they gave Italy a 1.6% chance of winning. For my non-football/soccer readers this is interesting because Italy did not quality for the World Cup.
• And finally, it’s yet-another well written article on the Netflix Tech blog – Full Cycle Developers at Netflix?—?Operate What You Build

A while back, inspired by Roy Rappaport’s manager readme, I created my own. Unfortunately too late for most of my Unity hires, but a fun reflection exercise anyway. I originally had this on our internal wiki, but I recently moved it to my github site as a more permanent location.

A few of you already saw this go public last week in the hackernoon article, but for total transparency, you’re welcome to view my “manager readme” on my github site here.