Category: All Posts

So. Much. Stuff. Going. On. Here are some things I found interesting and exciting over the last week.

• I finally got around to reading Michael Lopp’s The Art of Leadership: Small Things Done Well, and as expected, it’s filled with great ideas and fantastic advice.
• I’ve pointed to the WTF just happened today website in the past, but today’s post is worth bringing that up again.
• I’ve been thinking a lot about eventually reaching a post-pandemic world – including many of the thoughts from this article on The Uncertain Future of Corporate HQs
• Check out this Zalgo text generator
• U

• I had fun for a bit this week playing with keyvalues.com – you select the values you care about, and it tries to match you with a company.
• I haven’t called out a Jeff Nyman blog post in a while, but I enjoyed his article on shapes of tests
• Something important for the near future – The surprising traits of good remote leaders
• Also highly relevant is this article on burnout debt.
• And finally the unix epoch hits a nice round number this weekend.

Enjoy your weekend and stay safe.

How is it September already? Here are a few things I want to share from my stumbles around the web this week.

• Amazon decided this week that I can’t back up my Synology NAS to amazon drive anymore. In related news, I have canceled my Amazon drive service while I find a new offsite backup. I have a few hundred gigs of flac audio stored in Glacier, but hopefully that will continue to work.
• Abstracta recently released a list of their top testing podcasts (including AB Testing)
• I enjoyed this blog poast on The Impostor’s Advantage
• I’ve thought frequently over the past few months about the systemic impact of entire work forces staying home. This article on how remote work is killing the office economy is a good summary of those thoughts.
• I probably won’t fly anywhere for another year, but interesting to read that airplanes aren’t actually hot spots for Covid.

Here are some links I found interesting this week.

• I find Jim Gaffigan reasonably funny, but he’s gained additional respect from me this week when he lost it over Trump
• Steve Denning has thoughts on what good agile looks like
• Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything looks like it will be a really nice addition to the D&D world – especially the controversial (?!) change to how racial traits work
• Johanna Rothman (who makes frequent appearances here) wrote an article last month on agile death marches – which is also a nice list of many of the things I hate about scrum
• ICYMI, Citigroup made a “clerical” error with a software installation and lost about $900M

• My calendar has been…exploding lately (all good meetings – just re-org aftermath). I’ve been using reclaim.ai to keep an eye on meeting trends and to automatically block out 30-60 minutes every afternoon in order to make sure I don’t get too far behind.
• Here’s a nice article asking, Do I need Kubernetes
• Old article, but new to me on ways to visualize product development work
• I usually enjoy Steve Yegge posts – this latest is not an exception – Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You
• Last, but not least, you should read this article on What xkcd tells us about dependencies and NIH syndrome

More random stuff

• I enjoyed this interview with Lee Atchison – particularly check out his answer regarding DevOps
• Joel Montvelisky wrote a nice article on Focusing More on Quality and Less on Testing
• Mike Cohn is one of my heroes – and he’s giving a free webinar on Tuesday
• So…Microsoft has an “open source hub” – which is weird, because they own github. It also reminds me that Microsoft used to have their own open source site many years ago – feel free to remind me of the name if you remember. edit: CodePlex was the name of the portal from many years back.
• I’ve been playing Fall Guys, and it’s a blast!

Once again, here’s a random sampling of the internet I found interesting this week.

• Not something a lot of people will like, but I agree with the authors here – we need another lockdown.
• Google wrote a nice blog on code coverage
• Kubecon Europe is starting on August 17th. Of course it’s virtual (although not at ideal times from someone on the west coast like me). Almost exciting as the content is the price – $75.
• Here’s an interesting idea – SQL Queries for Git Repositories
• Last but not least – Another damn excel story

• I’m excited to experiment with Github Chaos Actions – I came across them last weekend in this article.
• Yes, I think I will link to yet-another Michael Lopp blog post. This time it’s a post about your mid-year leadership checkin.
• This post on the dystopian world of software interviews is on the money. This is something I am actively working to fix.
• It’s no secret that I LOVE Pat Lencioni’s business fables. I just found his podcast, and I’ve happily been binging it on my dog walks.
• In my 22 years at Microsoft, I spent a little time in the windows org. While there are a few really smart people there, let’s just say I’m completely unsurprised there’s a bug that crashes laptops when the screen is open or closed

As I write this, feds are descending on our poor liberal city to help protect us from coffee overdoses and hacky-sack eye injuries. We’ll see how the weekend goes. Here’s some stuff to read if we survive.

• John Cutler wrote a nice follow up to a three-year-old post – 12 Signs You’re Working in a Feature Factory — 3 Years Later
• It’s no secret that I’m not a scrum fan, and I’m not afraid to call it “agile for people who don’t want to be agile”. A slightly less controversial – but valid stance hit my reading list this week. 5 things I hate about Scrum
• I LOVE a good incident retro. Here’s what happened last week when the internet was broken – Cloudflare outage on July 17, 2020
• I don’t always make fun of Microsoft (but ftr, I’ve earned that right). This article on some data analysis on wide-spread wfh is good.
• Finally – on a whim – and with only a short notice, we livecast the latest recording of the AB Testing podcast (which you can watch if you want. The edited version will also appear in your podcast app on Monday).

Here’s some interesting stuff I found this week.

• I always love when Cindy Sridharan posts – this one is no exception.. Post-Commit Reviews
• This is a great article on myths (or realities) of time management
• Long time readers know that I ski for a week in Whistler every year – I hope to someday take longer ski vacations there…if they every let Americans back into Canada. Their total infection rate is less than any of the 50 US states.
• Absolutely excellent post (and series) from Janet Gregory on Testing vs quality management
• Microsoft “re-imagined” procmon for linux. I couldn’t get it to work on ubuntu 20.04, but I’m sure I’ll give it a run someday. A brief scan of comment streams tells me that nobody else can build it either. This is so microsoft.