Fog Creek Fun

When I was 9 years old, I’d play pick up soccer at recess. A couple of kids – the “leaders” would pick teams, and then we’d play. Since we were kids, the leaders of the teams were sometimes the best players, but usually the loudest kids. Leadership was short-lived, but effective for the purpose. I…

Our family spent a bunch of time this weekend cleaning out the garage and taking care of a variety of long neglected household tasks. One thing I’d been meaning to do for over a year now is to get my Ducati up and running again. Between picking kids up (need a car for that), and…

I think it’s been a long time since I took more than a week between posts. I was busy at WAT2, and then busy catching up from being busy at WAT2. I’ve had a busy travel schedule this year (a plane trip every month so far this year), and although Durango is closer to home…

Every day, it seems, I come across an article, a forum posting, a blog, or a tweet bemoaning the end-of-test-as-we-know-it because some company has hired / is hiring people with programming knowledge to become testers. I’ve written about coding-testers (here, and in other posts) before (as have many others that I’m too lazy to look…

Today I saw yet another info-byte on the perils of multi-tasking. I too, think that multitasking is rarely (if ever) as productive as multitaskers believe it is (note: my favorite study compares bong hits with multitasking…ymmv) – but we’ve all seen stuff like this over time. What’s missing from many of the studies and stories…

I do a lot of mentoring and coaching within Microsoft. I like to help people, it’s fun, and it’s nice that I have a manager that sees the value in that. Sometimes, the coaching I do is on improving testing ability, increasing testing breadth or brainstorming testing ideas. Most often, however, I help people think…