Category: All Posts

it’s been a good week – as far as weeks go over the past 15 months. Here are your Friday links:

• I got my first vaccine shot this week (Moderna). Here’s how to get yours.
• I’m speaking at Testing Festival next week. Lots of great talks there as well.
• I’m reading The Culture Map. I’m halfway through, and even after managing globally distributed team for many years, I’ve learned a lot about how I can do it better.
• I don’t get to do any real dev work anymore, but I live vicariously through my team, and articles like this one on branch optimization.
• I am, as you’d expect, partial to articles that compare anything musical to leadership. This one is good on several other merits as well – What Separates Great Leaders From the Okay-ish Ones?

We’re already a third of the way through 2021. It’s still a wild world, but I’m signed up to get my first vaccine dose on Monday, so that light at the end of the tunnel is looking just a little bit brighter.

Here’s some stuff from my world this week.

• I wrote another article for TestProject – this one on a better (and frankly, more obvious) way to learn test automation.
• I joined the club of people with big monitors this week when I got this 34″ Samsung monitor. I’m happy to say that my 4+ year old GTX 1060 can drive it at 3440×1440 at 75hz (along with an older monitor at 1920×1080. With this monitor, I’m also using my mac more as a secondary machine.
• If anyone on my team reads this, they’ll agree that I bring up the need frame conversations to help others get the most out of a conversation. The First Minute by Chris Fenning is a great book to understand framing (Framing = (Context + Intent + Key Message)). It’s a quick read, and well worth it.
• Yet-another – but also a good write up / guide on 1:1 meetings.
• Finally, a really good article on scalaing mono repos at git. A lot here to learn for those (like me) who are wary of mono repos.

Kind of a lot going on in the world of the Weasel this week, but I found a few things worth sharing.

• This came out well before FfF was a thing, but apparently my boss recently listened to this interview with me from ~6 years ago. I’m moving to a new manager at Unity, so figured I should post this for posterity soon.
• A month or two ago, I posted an article from inkommon.com with the results of a study of working from home during the pandemic. They published a follow up this week, which is equally as interesting.
• Highly related is this article on Software Development Trends for 2021.
• A colleague (from the team I’m joining) found this article on interviewing, which is full of head nods and “duh”‘s.
• I’m now running Hirsute Hippo (Ubuntu 21.04), and so far, all is working quite well. Someday I’m sure I’ll use a different distro, but for now, it’s been great.

Back for another week of random stuff I found on the internet.

• The State of Testing Report is out – lots of interesting insights and info.
• Maaret Pyhäjärvi has a short, but nice blog on learning from failure that’s worth reading
• Not sure who else is using Sourcgraph (or why I haven’t heard of it before), but it’s what org wide code search should look like.
• Great article from HBR on What Does It Mean to Be a Manager Today.
• We’re doing a little security ctf (capture the flags) competition at work, and it reminded me that just about everyone in software should try at least a few of these. The CTF 101 site is a great place to start.

Back again with interesting – but potentially useless links I found valuable this week

• It’s ~6 weeks away, but now is good enough time as any to let you know that I’m speaking at Testing Festival in May
• It’s a bit of a long read, but this article on persuading the unpersuadable is full of insight
• I came across a nice little story (and accompanying video) on large scale risk analysis
• Yet-another story about harassment in tech. This article from a former Google employee is well written and offers a lot of points for reflection.
• I talk a lot within my org about psychological safety – I found this article that works well as a primer for the concept.

Back for another week – remember, if you would like an email version of FfF, you can sign up here (nvm – it’s broken again)

• Charity Majors shared a fantastic deck on continuous delivery – worth checking out.
• Two from fellow today, becuase I don’t think I ever called out the Super Managers podcast. Every time I get a new episode, I think – “I don’t know if I’ll like this one or not”, and every time, I’m wrong.
• I was thinking of Fellow, because they just published a heavily researched piece on meetings that I will find ongoing value with. Note – the link requires an email address, so do with that what you will.
• This article on the power of self-organizing teams feels like it was pulled from by brain – I found myself nodding and smiling all the way through the read.
• Pluralsight is free in April, and there’s probably something there worth looking into.

Back again, and once again, if you’d like to receive this post via email, you can sign up here. Here are some things you should know this week.

• First – I wrote another article for TestProject – this one on Testing and the Road to Quality. I’m happy to say that with this article nobody (so far) has asked if I’m referring to “testing” or “checking”)
• I forget where I read, “The best time to give feedback is yesterday. The second best time is now”- but this article on giving feedback embodies that statement along with a lot of great advice.
• Speaking of feedback – this is a great article on owning your own 1:1. Again, a ton of great advice.
• I love when people find cool ways to do useless things. Like this.
• I’m sick of guns being more important than voting. Here’s one of many articles with the same opinion.

See you all next week!

Good news – I was able to put a simple captcha in place that may slow the spam signups to the FfF newsletter.

Bad news – I didn’t get all of the plumbing put back together. I’ll have it set up by next week for any of you who would prefer to have this weekly set of links emailed to you as I publish.

Here’s a few interesting things I found this week.

• I’m quickly becoming a big fan of the Darknet Diaries podcast. Good stories, good interviewing, and an endless stream of interesting anecdotes on security and the “darker” parts of the web.
• I don’t think I heard about it on darknet diaries, but I found this password checker website really fun to play with.
• Great article from HBR this week asking, does your office have a jargon problem?
• I frequently (constantly?) criticize hiring and interview paradigms. This article on bias in hiring reminded me that I need to continue to ask hard questions on this topic.
• I love good debugging stories. Here’s a good one from github.

Stay safe and have a good week.

HI again, everyone – I’ve temporarily turned OFF my exciting newsletter feature because I was seeing a large amount of spam email addresses show up. While they’re harmless, I think I can make the sign up feature work a bit better. Stay tuned.

ok – here’s some new (to me) stuff

• I was on the Trivial Warfare Blitz podcast released this week where I managed to answer a few random questions.
• Nicole Forsgren (along with a few other authors) delivered a fantastic article this week – The SPACE of Developer Productivity
• Yet again, I’m referencing the Netflix Tech blog – this short article on their remote workstations is fantastic.
• Last month I attended a one day virtual conference on accelerating quality. Areti Panou shares her experience in this post.
• Damn this is cool – A glitch in World of Warcraft may may have predicted how we’d react to the pandemic

Back here for another week. As I mentioned last week, if you would like FfF in your mailbox every week, you can sign up here. The sign-up process feels a bit wonky to me, and I think my early subscribers may be spam bots, but ymmv.

Also note that I’m still learning how to use the wordpress plugin I installed to send newsletters, so feedback is appreciated as I continue to tweak.

Here’s some stuff I found interesting or worth sharing this week.

• Given my love of Radical Candor – I pre-ordered Kim Scott’s latest book – Just Work: Get Sh*t Done, Fast & Fair
• I’ve started to take inventory of the different personality and strength tests I’ve taken. I’ve done MBTI, Insights, Strength Finders, and probably a few others. Two of my favorites are The Working Genius (which I mentioned a few FfFs ago, and one called the Kolbe test – it’s less known, but pretty interesting. Here are my results from when I took it a few years back.
• This ‘Day in the Life’ post from the Netflix tech blog is really interesting. At least I think so.
• I found this article on being a senior engineer – or better put, and article on how to get shit done when you have to influence people. It’s 3 years old, but still worth watching.
• Why I hate the web lesson 137. HTTPWTF

Thanks for reading – see you next week.