Category: All Posts

Just like that, it’s the last Friday of the month. One new thing this week is that I’m playing with a newsletter version of FfF for those who would like to see my links in their inbox instead of my blog site.

There’s a sign-up sheet here.

Now onto the links.

• Still a few weeks out, but I’m doing another internet thing on March 25th
• This article on the disagreement quota is an interesting article that I need to continue to ponder.
• This is a super-cool writeup of scaling reporting at Reddit.
• There are some really good ideas and some good advice in this article on how to stay optimistic when everything is awful.
• In a sign of things that will undoubtedly continue, Mercedes had a bit of a software issue this week

That’s it for this week – see you in March.

Back again and sharing a few cool things I found this week.

• I wrote another article for TestProject – this one on why developers should write all (or at least most) of your automated tests.
• While I’m self-promoting, I’m giving a webinar next Wednesday on developer vs. tester mindsets.
• Former guest on the ABT 343 podcast Conor Fitzgerald wrote a nice article this week on his experience with the schools of software testing.
• Wow, wow, wow – this article summing up the state of remote work is excellent.
• In not surprising news, turns out Covid-19 spreads when a bunch of people get together inside.

Stay safe out there – thanks for reading (and clicking)

Another week whirled by – here’s some stuff I found worth sharing.

• I polished off another fiction book last week – this time it was Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. It’s a quick and fun read – not 5-stars good, but definitely interesting enough to recommend.
• Someone on the ABTesting slack pointed me to rephonic.com, and this very cool visualization showing the relationship of the AB Testing Podcast and other podcasts
• If you were under a rock, you may have missed the hidden security challenges in package management – Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies
• I’m doing a virtual meetup for the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference next month – you can sign up here.
• I don’t really get to write much code anymore, but I came across lite recently, and wow – it’s small and fast, and I like it.

The light at the end of the tunnel is tiny…but it’s there. Here’s some stuff to share this week.

• President Biden has promised 100M vaccinations in 100 days. The math isn’t hard to see that the end is still a long way off. I’ve been checking in on this vaccination tracker to see just how far we’ve come – and how far we have to go.
• I’m currently reading Hidden in Plain Sight – which is turning out to be one of the most enlightening and educating books I’ve ever read.
• In case you missed it, I moved the modern testing site off of the old wordpress site hosted here to its own …also wordpress site.
• Deserted Island Devops (the conference hosted inside Animal Crossing) is accepting submissions
• After almost 20 years of riding a Ducati, I upgraded to a 2020 Harley Davidson Forty Eight. Here’s a picture of mine.

We all made it through another week. Here’s some stuff for you to check out.

• Charity Majors is awesome – and so is her latest blog post advice to managers.
• Camille Fournier (author of The Manager’s Path) also had a great post this week on Boring Plans.
• Corey Quinn wrote a fascinating post on compensation at Amazon. I knew bits and pieces of this, but seeing all the details was interesting.
• I also enjoyed this article on how Google came up with the SRE role.
• Like a lot of people, I think the US Electoral College is a stupid bit of legacy government that is long overdue for overhaul or cancellation. Here’s some more info.

Here are a few of my favorite articles I found this week

• In case you missed it, I wrote something.
• This article on Maximizing Developer Effectiveness is excellent and full of great ideas.
• I try not to re-post every Michael Lopp article, but this one, like many others, is worth sharing.
• Like a lot of other people, I was blown away by Amanda Gorman’s poem on Wednesday.
• My friends over at Autify wrote a great post on what is – and what is not unit testing

See you next week.

Welp – it’s been another one of those weeks. Here’s some stuff I found that helped me get by.

• I’m still on a fiction break. This week, I read Ready Player Two – and it wasn’t bad. I definitely enjoyed the first book more, but this one was enjoyable and a good read (and I’m a sucker for all of the 80s pop culture references)
• A lot of you may have heard me talk about how World of Warcraft and self-organizing teams are similar (I call it the World of Warcraft guide to Project Management). Here’s a recent post with a very similar (and more in depth) take.
• Another great article talking about the rise of the chief of staff role.
• This article on why we need data engineers and not data scientists is well-written, logical, and IMO about time someone wrote this.
• This is the last FfF I’ll ever write during the presidency of the worst human being ever to hold the office. If you’re out of the loop, read this to see how fucked up things are in the U.S. right now.

What a week to start off the year. Hopefully, it’s just leftover 2020 continuing to fester. Here’s some new stuff to talk about.

• Thankfully, former president Trump was finally permanently suspended from twitter
• I picked up a set of Galaxy Buds+, and I absolutely love them. I wear them almost constantly.
• My role at Unity is sometimes like a chief-of-staff role, so I found this article on chiefs of staff at several tech companies valuable and interesting.
• This is an excellent post on The Ideal Senior Engineer.
• I read some fiction over the last few weeks. One book I enjoyed a lot was The Silent Patient – probably something I’ll re-read someday now that I know the answer.

I am taking the rest of the year off, so this the last FfF of 2020. Let’s hope 2021 goes just a little bit better.

• There’s been a lot of lying with statistics in the news recently, so I was happy to see this article about the data literacy needed to better understand what’s going on with covid vaccine trials
• I updated my Synology NAS this week – I pulled the drives out of my old unit, plugged them into the new unit, and I was up and running in minutes with all of my data intact.
• Earlier in the pandemic, I played through Ori and the Will of the Wisps – I liked it so much that recently played through Ori and the Blind Forest, and I enjoyed it just as much.
• This is a fascinating story of an almost engineering disaster
• Worth mentioning that the Sounders are in the MLS cup again. Match is tomorrow – watch it.

The year keeps puttering along – here are a few things I found interesting this week.

• I’ve been spending a lot of time recently learning about “FinOps” – the website has some information, but I’m finding a lot of interesting info as I scour the net (book reco coming next week. If you happen to be in this field, would love to talk.
• I’m…not good with photo editing (but working on it). One easy thing that’s helped is remove.bg for automatic removal of image backgrounds. I wish I knew about it sooner.
• I’ve been binging a bit on the Chaos Community video series. The episodes are quirky and informative.
• I’m working on creating more opportunities for self-organizing teams within my org, and this article on reimagining the org chart gave me a lot to think about.
• My leadership philosophy shifted the first time I read Lencioni when I realized that as a manager, my first team is my peer org. This article on first team has a great view on that concept.