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Happy New Year FfF readers. I had a nice little break from posting, but the random links of random things are back.

• I read fiction during my break. I like fiction, but I read so many other books that I don’t make time for it. I read four books over break, but I am an absolute sucker for books about time travel. I just find it interesting to see how yet-another-author tries to explain how time travel works in their made up world. Nobody does a great job, but I read Recursion, by Blake Crouch, and Lost In Time, by A.G. Riddle, and both authors made a reasonable attempt. Neither of these two are literary masterpieces, but they were fun reads (Recursion being a bit better).
• One link will get you many – this is the first post in a series on Writing and Improving Code with AI. I think the people who figure out how to accelerate and improve their work through AI will be the superstars of the future.
• Linked in shared their Developer Productivity and Happiness Framework. I think it’s definitely worth browsing (if not bookmarking).
• I read this article on 8 Essential Qualities of Successful Leaders – it’s pretty good, and there’s nothing I disagree with – but given that the attributes lean heavily on the human side, I think self-reflection may be missing. Without the ability to look at yourself, and the way you’re coming across, some of these would be hard to master.
• Here’s a fun one to close with. A developer thought they were interviewing. Instead, the fake hiring company drained their crypto wallet.

It’s good to be back – thanks for reading (and thanks internet for an endless supply of interesting articles)

Hi folks – FfF is going to be sporadic over the remainder of the year due to travel, breaks, etc. But…I found some stuff this week worth reading.

• This is a few months old, but this article on Death by a Thousand Microservices makes a lot of great points.
• I read a lot of Seth Godin, but I don’t link to his posts very much. This one, however, is excellent. All of his posts are short, and easy to read in a minute – but most will make you think and reflect for much longer.
• Another older one – this came out of a conversation I was having around pitch and frequency, and wondering exactly how music detection algorithms work. My guess was close, but massively incomplete. This article on How Shazam Works, answered all of my questions.
• I’ve written before how much I’m a fan of The First Minute by Chris Fenning – as it teaches you an easy to use framework for framing conversations and getting to the point quickly. I thought this simple article on How To Introduce Yourself is fantastic as well for, and something here for all of us to learn.
• Finally, another must-read (IMO) for leaders – The Key To Building A Psychologically Safe Team

If you don’t hear from me again until January, have a great holiday season. Catch up with you soon.

Welcome back to another FfF. Here are a few interesting things I found this week.

• I post this every year, but it’s worth it. The 2023 Advent of Code begins today. I never do it all, but I always do a week or two. Tons of fun and stupid programming tricks.
• Here’s one to save – a nice concise post on The Bluffers Guide to the Mythical Man Month
• Like a lot of people, I’m still wallowing in the possibilities of Generative AI. This article on how Generative AI will transform virtual meetings is promising.
• Many of you know that I’m a huge trivia lover. I had a chance this week to attend a few dive-bar trivia sessions put on by Seattle Bar Trivia, and had a blast.
• Downtown Seattle still hasn’t quite recovered to what it was before the pandemic, but I like the ideas in this Downtown Seattle Activation Plan

Thanks again for reading. See ya’ in a week.

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!