Five for Friday – March 6, 2020

Hey – it’s April. It’s still a bit cold and wet in Seattle, but a few extra birds are around, and Todoist reminded me to take the snow tires off of my car, so it must be spring. Here are a few links I found this week that were fun to read. Thanks again for…

I gave a short talk to an internal MS community this week. The topic of the day was “influence”, and I thought it was appropriate to talk about the value of building (and maintaining!) an informal network – and the impact of that network on influence. The advice to have an informal network isn’t new…

I left a few of my Nest devices in the old house, but after some shopping around, decided to re-up my Nest usage with a v3 thermostat, and a Nest lock to augment some of the replacement devices. We’ll see how it goes. Other than soccer, I don’t watch a lot of TV. But I…

I chuckle a bit every time I see a tweet or a blog post talking about how some attribute is uniquely important for anyone wanting to be successful in a software role – when in reality, there are many professions where these attributes help lead to success. I’m not saying the attributes aren’t important, but…

I was nothing short of blown away over the past few days, when some comments I made on twitter about UI automation caused a lot of folks to raise their eyebrows. Here’s the tweet in question. I’m not against discussions on the invalidity of the test automation pyramid. If you don’t like it, you use…

Yesterday, I read a mail sent to an email alias I’m on, where the author was asking why tool X wasn’t enabled on his latest build. The mail looked something like this (genericized to protect the innocent). foo.service doesn’t appear to be working Repro: I installed the build from <build_path> I verified the binaries existed…