Category: All Posts

Last week, I scheduled this post, and somehow in doing that I (debatable) made it a private post for subscribers only. That, of course, means that I’m going to schedule this post for 10 minutes from now to see what happens under careful observation.

• I scheduled the post last week, because I was walking 70 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. I first walked on the PCT nearly 50 years ago, and have been a bit infatuated with it (off and on) ever since. Someday, I’d like to walk all 2650 miles of it.
• Open Org recently released their Employee Handbook Template – and it’s kind of cool – or at least worth checking out.
• I’m currently balancing my DM and Group Chat time between Teams and Slack (weird, but true). I’m pretty sure I don’t want this, but in my haphazard searching to try and see how other folks balance this, I found that some teams just give up and use a tool like Mio Dispatch to make them both feel like one tool.
  I’ll keep looking for a better answer.
• I think at a lot of companies, it takes too long to get new engineers up to speed. This article on onboarding new engineers hit’s the main points (and with great citations to back up their claims).
• Finally, some food for thought. This post asks, Are bugs and slow delivery ok? I think the question is valid – and while I agree that for some products, slow and buggy may be ok, but I disagree that it’s 95%…but I sort of hate that the author is sort of right.
  I need to ponder this some more…

That’s all for this week – apologies again for the posting mishap last week, I’ll try to keep my shit together.

This is – hopefully – an auto post. I am taking a very long walk in the woods this weekend.

Edit: WTF, WordPress? Maybe I accidentally changed a setting that I just spent 5 minutes searching for. Of course, that means I need to send next weeks post via scheduled delivery too…

• This is a repost, but worth it – I did a podcast / videocast with the folks at Mobot a few months ago, but they keep finding cool clips to share – like this one.
• Also in the “did it a few months ago, but here it is” category – I have a blurb in this article on aligning teams towards north star metrics.
• Everyone in the world is going to include this link in their newsletters this week, but I really enjoyed The Password Game. I didn’t finish it, but I had fun trying.
• In my opinion, other than a manager 1:1, the team retrospective is the most important meeting. This statement isn’t true if your retros suck – here’s how to do Retros that Don’t Suck.
• I find a gem in HBR almost every week – this week was no exception with this article on How Managers Can Make Time for Their Own Development

Time to hit the scheduled post button and see what happens. L8r

We all made it through another week. That’s all. We survived. Here’s some stuff I found while we were surviving.

• Aahhh – something I could (and may) write about a lot. One person’s take on Microsoft’s Shitty Stack System
• Speaking of my writing, I don’t think it’s a secret that I use AI for images on my substack posts. Yes, I know it’s derivative and it takes away work from artists (or not, since the alternate is no pictures). Brent and I have talked at length about this on the podcast. This week, Matt Schellhas writes about a similar experience here – The Anti-Hero Photo
• Jesper Ottosen wrote a great article this week called Don’t Overthink Test Cases.
• I planned on linking to a John Cutler article before Jesper linked to one of his tweets, but felt it was worth calling out the coincidence. John’s article this week on Explicit vs. Implicit Strategy is excellent and timely
• I’m very happy to be in a fully remote work-wherever-I-want role. At the same time, it’s fascinating to see that Seattle is a ghost town compared to 2019. Companies want people back – but for the wrong reasons. Anyway – here’s an article from the Seattle times on the subject – Return to office in Seattle and beyond enters the desperation phase

Thanks for reading – have a great weekend,

I’m continuing to try and enjoy summer here while it lasts – before it gets too hot. Summer in the pacific northwest is why we put up with the gray and wet for the other 11 months of the year. Anyway – here’s some stuff I read or found this week that you may find interesting.

• After years of disappearing into the woods and returning to civilization “when I get there”, I finally bought a GPS Tracker – a Garmin In Reach Mini. It can track my location on a map, and let me send text messages or an SOS if needed. It also gives me a little more confidence to take less maintained trails and still find my way.
• My Saturday angryweasel.substack.com blog post was about using AI / Chat GPT in testing. Jason Arbon wrote a wonderful post and highly relatable post on the subject. Counterfeit Philosophers in Testing
• I understand that businesses want to make money. What I don’t understand is why businesses create pricing that forces people to not use their product. I have many examples, but the most relevant is Reddit – who decided to charge a ridiculous amount of money to access their API – and then have the site fail when communities did exactly what they said they’d do. smh
• I just binged watched all four seasons of Barry. I love dark humor, and Bill Hader is just fantastic in this show. It may not be for everyone, but I loved it.
• Last but not least – Monday is Juneteenth in the U.S. I’ve been taking some time this week to read more about the holiday, and enjoyed this HBR article on How Your Organization Can Recognize Juneteenth

That’s it for this week. For those of you who double dip in FfF and substack, my post will be late this week, as I’m heading out for my first (of several) backpacking trips of the year after work this afternoon. See you all next week.

It’s been a week. Between sick pets, budget exercises, political indictments, and some odd hate talk getting into my linkedin feed, there’s a lot going on inside the stuff I care about…but I still found a few things I think are worth sharing.

• It’s Pride month. Even if you think you know what it’s all about, these pride facts probably have something new for you.
• Nobody really knows how to use public cloud. That’s not actually true, but I think more orgs need to think about it more. Articles like this one on Why I recommended ECS instead of Kubernetes to my latest customer are wonderful for reminding us how to think about the most efficient ways to build “cloud things” given the massive number of choices we have.
• I haven’t linked to a Mike Cohn blog in a while, but this week’s post is worth a revisit. Why Sustainable Pace Is So Important to Agile Teams
  Working beyond a sustainable pace leads to stress, which leads to mistakes.
  So True!
• Ran across this on The Verge this week – Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore. I think this sentiment is growing in tech companies – but I can’t tell if it’s because they believe (or have data) showing that it’s better (because everything I’ve seen is the opposite), or if companies feel like they’re losing money because nobody is going to the office.
• I’ve read many articles and books on effective meetings. Most are crap and miss the point. This article on How to Have More Effective Meetings is not crap. In fact, it’s clear, concise, and accurate. Read it, and then (like me) look forward to Part 2.

Thanks again for reading. Be nice to each other and have a great weekend.

Friday again – and it’s a beautiful day in Seattle. Here are some things I found today that maybe you want to know about too.

• Most people know that I’m a big fan of AI. A lot of people also know that I think most people are using it wrong. Something I’ve also thought a lot is that The AI Hype Cycle Is Distracting Companies – and this article from HBR is spot-on!
• I’m in a new role (well, it was new two months ago). I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s important and how to be effective, and was happy to read that I haven’t yet fallen into any of the traps in this article on How To Fail as a Leader, but it’s also a reminder of what I need to do purposefully to be successful.
• For better or for worse, I spent some time debugging (mostly) and writing (a little) x86 assembly language in my career. I thought this tutorial / walkthrough on Learn x86-64 assembly by writing a GUI from scratch was easy to follow, and helpful. Even if you think you don’t want to know assembly language, it’s worth a read.
• It’s that time – the 2023 State of DevOps survey is open. I enjoy the results more than the survey, but you can’t have one without the other. Go fill it out.
• When Wordle first came out, I played it every day. Then, the (old) day job got gross, and I stopped. But – I’ve started playing again, and it’s still a lot of fun for me – and only 15 more days before I tie my old streak.

…and yes, I do feel bad about those two puzzles where I couldn’t solve the word.

Anyway, I thought this analysis on wordle letter usage was really well done – and interesting.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Another week, more at least partially interesting articles and links to share. You don’t read this sentence anyway, so let’s get to the bullets.

• I was on the Mobot How It’s Tested podcast telling stories about testing – and depending on where you are in your software development journey, either telling you what you already know, or spouting complete bullshit. Give it a listen and let me know.
• I like this lens on 1:1 meetings – A 1:1 Tool to Keep it Light & Intentional. It’s similar to the ACM model I frequently use (and both the author and I draw from Csikszentmihalyi for inspiration)
• I really enjoy the Two Wrongs blog series. It’s well written and full of fun information. This week’s post – The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Conditional Probabilities – is a fun dive into statistics, but I recommend you check out some of the articles on systems thinking as well.
• I LOVE a good debugging story, and this story on Debugging a FUSE deadlock in the Linux kernel is (to me) a great read.
• Finally, I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again (or the writers at HBR will) – AI can help you ask better questions. I use chat GPT as a collaborator – not an answer-bot, and my experience has been great.

Once again – thanks for reading. Let me know if I missed something important. Enjoy your weekend.

Oh hey – it’s Friday again already. Things are a bit…busy for me, but my random bits of reading still led to a few things I thought were worth sharing.

• Abi Noda, Margaret-Anne Storey, Nicole Forsgren, and Michaela Greiler just published a fantastic paper on developer productivity – but rather than link directly to the article, I think a better starting point is Abi’s post about it – A New Approach To Measuring Developer Productivity
• I can’t not share this post with a little info about the new gig. This article on engineering at NBCU came out this week.
• I just started reading A New Way to Think. So far I like it – and can see myself recommending it, but it’s also not (yet) as awesome as the reviews make it out to me. I’ll update y’all when I finish it.
• Every once in a while, someone forwards me the Choose Boring Technology post from Dan McKinley – which I like…but I often push back on it a bit. It’s like I learned in college music theory courses – we spend almost two years learning rules (choose boring), but then talked about breaking the rules (i.e. taking risks – of course based on the rules. Anyway – that’s a whole blog post.
  This week, I found an article from last year that says “Boring” is just one strategy. And it’s right.
• And finally, this Indian tea shop is the first (as far as I know) to ride the wave of Chat GPT. No, they don’t use AI for their recipes, they just have a cool name.

And that’s all. Time to go play in traffic or something else unhealthy. Have fun this weekend.

Summer is here – or summer is here in spring – not quite sure what it is, but it’s hot. Speaking of hot, check out these hot links I found this week.

• The folks at Tricentis are spinning up a new community called ShiftSync It looks like a great community for everyone involved in software delivery. My article on The Testing Mindset Myth is posted if you want to re-read and discuss
• I’m still really enjoying Pop! OS on my system 76 laptop. Also really cool to see what they’re doing with the UI and Rust in their latest update.
• Aamir Siddiqui pinged me on linkedin this week to share this really cool article on Testing GPT-Based Large Language Models. In a world where a lot of folks spend way too much time automating user workflows, it’s great to see a proper application of automation.
• One of my former employers published an article that one of my other former employers should read. The Best of Both Worlds: Unlocking the Potential of Hybrid Work for Software Engineers is a highly interesting look into the worlds of in-person, remote, and hybrid work for software engineers.
  Here’s the kicker (note: my current role is fully remote!)
• I read this article on Why Agile Isn’t For Me thinking it would be yet another article on someone completely misunderstanding Agile. It turns out, the author does get it – and shares the same frustrations about what Agile has become in many organizations as I do.

And that’s it for this week – I hope you found something in these links that you like.

Kind of a weird week. I left sunny and hot Seattle to visit Los Angeles for a few days – where it was cloudy and rainy. And now that I’m back in Seattle, it’s cloudy and rainy here too. At least the new Guardians movie is out so there’s something good to do indoors. Meanwhile – here are a few links to things I found this week that I thought were interesting.

• I was bummed to read that Unity went through another round of layoffs. I don’t have insights into much on this one (and too much on the last one), but I hope my old colleagues are all doing well. It’s tough for a company to do three rounds of layoffs in a year.
• Speaking of corporate ugliness, I just gave Orbiting the Giant Hairball a re-read. It is THE book, in my opinion for putting some sense into navigating the workplace when the workplace feels like a giant hairball.
• I liked (and cringed at?) this article on a Tale of Two Interviews. Nothing destroys me more than giving a candidate a bad experience. Hiring teams need to do better.
• This is interesting – Amazon Prime moved from Serverless to EC2 and ECS to Save Costs. This quote is something I think more development teams need to notice:
  “We realized that distributed approach wasn’t bringing a lot of benefits in our specific use case, so we packed all of the components into a single process.“
• I’ve been a happy customer of Underground Cellar for several years. It was a great place to get highly drinkable wine at a reasonable price – PLUS, they’d store your wine for you until you wanted it. It was a great idea, of course, until they abruptly went out of business. Now they have several cases of wine that I’m likely never going to see again.

And on that note, I’m going to sign off from this blog post and get back to my day job. Have a good weekend.