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Just a heads up that I’ll probably take next Friday off from posting so I can play Starfield sleep all day. This week has been full of …stuff, but once again, here are a few things I found interesting.

• This article on The Struggle for Microservice Integration Testing was well written and provides a lot of great insights.
• I love a good root cause story, and this story on How one line of code caused a $60 million loss is worth reading (and learning from)
• I’m doing something I don’t recommend, and reading three books at once. Fortunately, two are re-reads of books that I think are important for me to refresh on right now. One of those (and one highly worth the re-read) is The No Asshole Rule by Bob Sutton. It’s the best book I know of for addressing the impact of negative behavior in the workplace.
• This is cool. Jason Arbon trained chatgpt on the writings of a bunch of “expert” testers – and it’s pretty good. Chat GPT Expert Tester Chat
• I’m a huge fan of The Oatmeal, as well as a long-time player of Exploding Kittens. Was excited to see the teaser for the Netflix series this week.

And that is that for another week. Hope you found something interesting, and I’ll see you in two weeks.

Busy week this week, but still ran across a few things worth sharing.

• At one point in my life, I was a coding font nerd. In the days before a million font choices, I would take painstaking amounts of time to find the exact font that would “accelerate my programming”. These days, I just take what I’m given. BUT – I’m kind of nerded out about the new GitHub Monaspace fonts. I’m planning a few small projects this winter (and may even do Advent of Code again), and I’m eager to play with them.
• Speaking of Git, this brief history and overview of Git is fantastic. I got to drive one of the very first Git adoptions at Microsoft many years ago, and would have loved to have had something like this to share with the folks who had used nothing but Perforce for fifteen years. Like the fonts, it also reminds me that I miss messing with this stuff sometimes.
• While I’m deep into software dev – if you somehow missed it, Gergeley Orosz just released The Software Engineers Guidebook – something that is bound to be on just about every serious developers bookshelf.
• I enjoyed Jason Arbon’s Laws of Test Managememt – my favorite is The Tool Principle – Most testing tools are bought by tools.
• And to round out this week’s list, Invincible is back (on Amazon Prime Video). I was a huge fan of season 1, so I was excited to see the first episode of season 2 come out this week.

Thanks again for reading – we’ll do it again in seven days.

We are officially in the end game of 2023, but the internet continues to supply me with interesting things to read.

• I’m currently re-reading The Surprising Science of Meetings. I forgot I read it, but I ran into it again, thought about buying it, but fortunately the online retailer known as “the jungle” reminded me that I already bought it. It’s still a great read the second time through.
• I am a super-fan of Jeli. Nora and her team built an amazing product that really helps teams learn from their mistakes – so I’m amazed and excited and all the feels over the news this week that PagerDuty is acquiring Jeli. It’s a great match, and I’m excited to see how the partnership develops.
• Lisa Crispin posted a great article this week on Leading quality in software organizations, and I strongly agree with her conclusions.
• I am a big believer in Trust and Safety as cornerstones of good teams, so I loved this article on What makes an effective development team.
• I wrote recently on the other blog about interviews, where I touched on the pros and cons of behavioral questions. This article on improving interview questions is much better and worth a read.

And now I’ve counted to five one more time, so it’s time to hit publish (or in this case, schedule the publish) and get on with my day.

I just realized that it’s almost Halloween. That means this weekend I either need to buy candy, or blackout curtains so I can pretend I’m not home. I’ll keep you posted.

Here’s the usual list of 5 things on the internet I think are worth sharing.

• If you’ve followed my numerous recommendations to subscribe to Abi Noda’s newsletter, you already know that every Friday he posts super insightful information about developer productivity and developer experience. This week’s post reviewing the 2023 DORA Report is worth calling out. I love that he calls out that there is so much more than the “4 metrics” that people tend to be the most excited about.
• This brief series on Fostering Motivation in Engineering Teams is full of stuff I love, and worth a read – Part 1, and Part 2.
• I’ve been listening to a lot of my old vinyl records recently. I was listening to Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, and I recalled the times where I was asked, “Why do you like Dylan – he’s a horrible singer?” It’s – he’s not a great singer, but he’s a fantastic songwriter and musician, and his voice fits his stories. This article on how Dylan blurred the lines between literature and music hits a lot of great points.
• I enjoyed this article from Dev Interrupted – Where are all the laid-off software developers going? It’s a great question with some thoughtful answers.
• Finally, in news that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, Taylor Swift is now a Billionaire.

Thanks for reading, and once again, I hope you found something useful.

It’s been a week – but the internet has entertained me just a bit. Here are a few things I found worth sharing.

• An interesting article in the Atlantic this week on how Biden is approaching the conflict in Israel. As I’ve advocated before – start with trust, and then bring on the pressure (or, disappoint people at a level they can absorb)
• I really liked this article on the Five Levels of Code Readability. I’ve read a lot of code in my career, including thousands of lines of hungarian notation c and c++, so I appreciate all efforts to make code more readable.
• I wrote about tech interviews several weeks ago on my other blog – but this article on stopping the algorithm madness in interviews is spot-on.
• A lot of points in this article on Why It’s So Hard to Leave a Bad Job resonated well with me. I also feel like the timing of the article isn’t …great, as it’s probably harder to find a new role (a good role) now than I recall in my career.
• I just wrapped up Season 2 of Wheel of Time and enjoyed it. It’s an interesting story and thought the visuals and story were fun.

That’s it for this week – see you soon.

Travel week, so I spent a bit less time on the internet, but still have a few things to share.

• On a flight on Monday, I just about finished The Right Kind of Wrong by Amy Edmondson. I adore The Fearless Organization, and this book builds on that and talks extensively about the types of mistakes we make and how we learn from those different experiences. It reminds me of Human Error by James Reason – but a much better read.
• It’s been a long minute since I lined to a Jeff Nyman post, but his article on What Actually Is Testing? is excellent, and a must read for anyone making software (certainly not just dedicated testers)
• And speaking of people I haven’t linked to in a long time, Keith Stobie just (or within the last few weeks) wrote about Testing LLM Generate Code – which is something I’m really concerned about. I think there is a rising amount of code being written and pushed to production that isn’t fully understood. That should be at least a little scary.
• I gripe a lot about Scrum, because teams too often get lost in the rituals over actually delivering incrementally and adaptively. One big gripe are standups, so was ecstatic to see Mike Cohn write about making standups better – .Daily Scrums Not Working? Try This Instead.
• I usually try to avoid Medium, but recently discovered the posts of Sebastian Carlos. His latest, How Upgrading Node Broke My Build but Saved My Marriage is fantastic.

Thanks again for reading – have a great weekend.

Wow – it’s October already. Here are some things I found interesting on the internet this week.

• Important things first. The DORA 2023 State of DevOps report is out.
• A lot of people forwarded me this response from Dan North on the “famous” (and ridiculous) McKinsey report from a few weeks back.
  It’s fair, ad good.
• Luc Gagan shared an interesting project he’s working on – a Software Testing Glossary. Given how awful the Wikipedia page on software testing is, I’m glad to see an alternative.
• My old colleague, Marcus Purvis shared this article on What the current wave of layoffs means for the games industry, and I found it full of good insights.
• And to round it out, Dev Interrupted posted a great article on How Healthy Engineering Teams Invest Their Time. The only bit I’d change is the areas of developer investment. I have found it critical to carve out time for Tech Debt. Tech Debt is different than Keeping the Lights On, and I’ve found if you don’t carve time out for it explicitly, it never gets done.
  I should blog about that sometime…

Thanks for reading – see you next week!

I think I’ve fully recovered from my long walk. My home office is a a mess right now, but I’m hoping this weekend is the time when I finally get everything put away. In the meantime, here are a few articles I found interesting this week.

• I’m well aware that almost all of you already read Michael Lopp’s blog posts. It’s no secret that I’m a fan, and I try not to read every article he writes. This week’s post on The Seven Meetings You Hate is worth posting here anyway.
• I’m one of those odd self-taught programmers, but I’ve always enjoyed some of the algorithm metaphors that exist. I really enjoyed this article on The Drinking Philosophers Problem.
• I learned about Steampipe this week (select * from cloud;). Looks like a lot of fun, and something I’m definitely going to be playing with.
• The internet (esp. linkedin) is full of people who haven’t bothered learning anything about AI or LLMs dismissing it all as a toy or a fad. The rest of us, are playing catch up, and getting as much context as we can to understand how LLMs will advance software engineering. I thought this article on Challenges with Adopting Domain-Specific LLMs had a lot of good thoughts and insights.
• I’m way behind on podcast listening, but I just added The Geeking Out podcast based entirely on the interview with Hazel Weakly.

Thanks again for reading, and hope you found something interesting. See you next week.

I’m just back from a trip off the grid, so probably missed a lot – but here are a few things I think are worth knowing about.

• First, a little about my trip. I just hiked The Wonderland Trail. I hiked the trail in about six and a half days – day two was 80+ degrees (Fahrenheit), and on day 6, I was getting snowed on. The joys of high altitude in the fall.
• After years of using the DuckDuckGo search engine, I began using their browser a few weeks ago. I love that it integrates directly with BitWarden.
• I enjoyed this well thought out – and accurate review of the current state of GitHub Actions.
• This morning, I read a great article on Stories Leaders should Tell.
• I found the Drawn to Leadership blog today, and enjoyed the post on Flow (as described by Mee-High Chick-Sent-Me-High (sp)).

Short and sweet this week – have a great weekend.

So much going on this week, but as usual, thought of a few things worth sharing.

• Way back in November 2017, I was on the Testers Island Discs podcast, where I shared five songs I’d listen to while stranded on a desert island. One of those songs was Twin Rocks Oregon, by Shawn Mullins – who I got to see and hang out with a bit last night. Always great to see him play, and I think most people know that I’m a sucker for singer songwriters.
• Something else I’m frequently fond of are articles about Feedback Loops. I enjoyed this one on Optimizing Feedback Loops
• I took the AWS icon quiz this week. It’s awesome and it’s dumb, and I don’t know anyone who got more than 4 right.
• I posted about the McKinsey article last week, and found another reaction to it this week that (I think) is worth reading.
• Finally this week is a great article The Slowest GitHub PRs In Recorded History. Pretty interesting stuff, and I wish I would have tracked something similar when I was at $job -2.

The sun is out in Seattle – have a great weekend everyone.