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Once again – here are a few things to share from my week.

• I read Malcom Gladwell’s Talking to Strangers this week – it was good, but even better than I expected. As usual with a Gladwell book, a lot of insights and great story telling
• The latest State of Devops report is out. I always find these interesting.
• I’ve been away from any serious code for a while, but TIL about git switch and git restore.
• I mostly stay out of the test community on twitter these days – I’d love to say it was because I wanted to create space, but it’s mostly because I just don’t think about many of those things as much as I used to. I did to a lot of reflection today, however, after reading this article from Fiona Charles.
• And finally, WTF, Microsoft?

Yet another busy week in the world, but I still found a few cool things to share.

• I started Measure What Matters a year ago, but have been reading it regularly recently – it’s settling well with me and I’m learning a lot.
• I’m late to the party, but I’m watching The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix, and I think it’s excellent.
• Interesting about Slack and ephemeral chat with nice takeaways.
• I just discovered staffeng.com – which has a lot of great information on growing into high level individual contributor roles.
• Finally, I enjoyed this post from Martin Fowler that asks, Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?

Between crying and lying, it’s been an interesting week. Here are a few things I liked.

• The next Online Testing Conference is coming up December 1-3 (one of those days is my birthday!)
• Yet another great post from Lisa Crispin – this time on shifting everywhere
• I worked on Windows compatibility…geez, maybe 25 years ago now, but I still love good debugging and investigation. Like in this article on making Mass Effect not require admin rights
• Ever since (I think) Team Topologies came out, the number of articles on battling Conway’s Law have multiplied. This one, however, is one that I like.
• I really enjoyed this talk from Abby Bangser on chaos engineering for mature organizations. It’s worth the time.

You may have noticed that there was an election in the US this week.

• Because you (or your friends and relatives) may need it – here’s the wikipedia article explaining our (U.S.) archaic process for electing presidents.
• Like a lot of people, I don’t have cable, and was a bit worried about watching live news coverage of the election. Fortunately, I found pluto.tv, and it gave me everything I needed and more.
• Some guy named Alex is now internet famous (w/ me at least) for writing a scraper to show some key stats about the elections in the remaining undecided states.
• It’s no secret that I’m a Pat Lencioni fan. A recent concept of his that I really like is the six types of genius, and it’s worth checking out.
• A clever software engineer named his company, “><SCRIPT SRC=HTTPS://MJT.XSS.HT> LTD (hopefully that shows up correctly when I publish this)

The US election is 4 days away. If you haven’t already voted – make a plan.

Here’s some new (to me) stuff this week.

• I didn’t have a TV until last week. I took a chance on a Hisense H9 series, and so far, it’s been a dream.
• I’m currently reading Seeking SRE. I like books (such as this one) that gather stories from different people with different perspectives. Not everything is useful, but there’s plenty here to think about.
• As someone who spent a few hours today building some Ikea furniture, I was surprised/not-surprised that their top selling item isn’t a piece of furniture.
• I forgot about the pyramid principle (I never read the book) until I saw this article recently. It’s a good tool for our communication toolboxes
• And – here’s everything that’s happened on the corona virus vaccine this week. I found it highly informative.

Here’s some stuff I liked this week.

• I’m going to prepare a talk for TestFlix – you should too.
• Speaking of presentations, I am using Pitch for my Testflix presentation – I’m not doing a lot with it, but it seems to work well
• Once upon a time, I wrote the daylight saving time detection logic for Windows CE, and I remember doing some work to make sure it worked in every time zone. Fortunately for me, all the details of time zone oddities were in a data file (same as on “big” windows). This article on Falsehoods programmers believe about time zones is a good reminder on why this stuff is so damn hard.
• Just in case you need it – 5 Countries to Move to if Trump Wins Again, Ranked
• If you ever wanted to administrate your kubernetes clusters in Minecraft, now you can

Not sure how it is where you live, but the weather is definitely cooling off here. Some stuff I found interesting this week is below.

• Angela Riggs has a nicely written article reflecting on the last days of her job at Instrument
• This is a really cool article on Adapting Maslow’s Hierarchy for a Remote World
• It’s completely stupid humour, but I watched it anyway. The Cabin is on Netflix, and I watched it on a whim, but burned through every episode.
• Here are 5 tips on how to be an awful remote manager
• A lot of folks use Selenium to create a lot of useless automation. Here’s an example of a much better usage pattern: How I Used Python and Selenium To Get a Lifetime Supply of Garlic Pizza Sticks

Not sure if it’s possible to find anything more interesting than Pence’s fly this week, but I tried.

• Mike Cohn wrote (yet another) article I enjoyed – this week’s topic asks, Are We Really Bat at Estimating?
• This twitter thread had some unsurprising thoughts (with some research) on the future of remote work.
• It’s now official. Excel is the world’s platform.
• As always when her posts show up here, Johanna Rothman has some great points on cycle time and lead time.
• And finally, an interesting look at a twitter user getting banned for posting…facts.

This year has been a great ten years. Here’s some stuff to share.

• Probably a repeat from a few years ago, but this site (and ABTesting) are hosted by chemicloud (affiliate link). Nearly 3 years into using them for hosting, and they haven’t dropped a step. I’ve never waited more than 5 minutes for support.
  I’ve updated my plan, so this site should be ever-so-slighly faster.
• I’ve been using Joplin for notes for a while, but it wasn’t quite good enough to keep my eyes from wandering, so now I’m experimenting with using Notion for my cross platform note taking.
• Worth calling out here (and thanks Chris for clueing me in) – Rocco Prestia – the fantastic bassist from Tower of Power passed away this week.
• This article on linkedin turning into a cringefest is spot-on
• Wear a damn mask (xkcd for options)

• 49 days until the US Presidential election. If you’re reading this in the US, make sure you’re registered – and double check your registration frequently. You can register, and confirm that you’re registered on vote.org
• I guess code for Windows XP leaked somewhere on the internet. I doubt it’s helpful (or interesting) given that XP isn’t supported anymore, but reading the article made me wonder if Windows is enough of a non-thing now that it should just be open-sourced.
• I’m oddly addicted to trivia questions. I know a lot about a little (but not really a lot about much at all). I just ordered this Trivia Calendar to to fuel my addiction.
• I’m glad someone wrote this down. Don’t Be Clever
• Nice post from Julian at Haystack on experimenting with process (including canceling standups)

See you next week.