I spent a big chunk of yesterday driving back from my yearly visit to Whistler BC, but still have a few things to share. First and foremost, I can’t recommend the waffles at the Crystal Hut enough. I’m not really a waffle eater, but I ate enough of my daughter’s waffle to give this place…
Once again, I’m a day late, but who am I kidding – you read these on Monday anyway. This is a great article on why we’re so bad at software engineering As a self-proclaimed change agent, this article on change programs was interesting Ministry of Test is doing some podcast interviews with upcoming speakers. This…
I just finished a re-read (or the first read of the second edition) or Release It! It is crammed full of things that everyone working on a website or software service should know – including this painful nugget:GitHub currently shows 288,093 commits with the title “Removed password.” Tomorrow that number will be higher. Sometimes I…
Early edition this week before I jump on a 10 hour flight home. An interesting article on the dark side of expertise Mot of you have heard of Google’s Testing on the Toilet initiative (one pagers on testing and engineering posted on stall doors). Now, here’s an academic paper on the topic For a decade…
This is the special time travel edition of FfF (I lost a day – mentally – while traveling). I have read, and re-read this article on Work is Work. It’s a fantastic analysis of organizational design. I plan on reading it yet again after I post this. It’s no secret that I like Radical Candor,…
It’s that time of year again. It’s time for folks to fill out the annual State of Testing Survey. Remember that testing is an activity, and not necessarily a role, so if you’re involved in software, you probably have valuable input. I’m a bit of a Michael Lopp (Rands) fanboy – Managing Humans remains one…
A little late today – I got so focused on finishing a presentation, that I forgot to even look at my todo list. My very first rock concert was a Rush concert in 1980. I have my ticket stub somewhere ($8 IIRC). Along with a lot of other folks in my demographic in the world,…
I’m back for another FfF earlier than I expected. Hope you find something interesting in these links. I enjoyed this article about the perils of SAfE. I found a few articles this week on learning from incidents – the first is on retrospectives at Inded The second is a few years old (but new to…
It’s been a long time since I wrote a post that wasn’t a Five for Friday, but this may be my last chance to write a decade-end post. Ten years ago, at the beginning of the decade, I was wrapping up a tour of duty in Microsoft’s Engineering Excellence group where I was a Director…
I’m going to take a few weeks off to end the year – the next FfF will be in early 2020 (ish). In the meantime, check this stuff out. I watched the impeachment hearings this week (spoiler, Trump was impeached). I tried to watch objectively, but Doug Collins being a shithead ruined it for me….
It’s the Friday the 13th version of FfF! New to me is this collection of culture decks – public slide decks describing the culture of several companies. A reminder that ‘Tis the Season for Technical Debt This is a year old, but I just found this series of articles from Steve Rubin on interviewing. Start…
It’s that time again. Kathy Keating has a great article this week on how Engineering Leaders are Failing Themselves Netflix has open-sourced another interesting tool – Open-Sourcing Metaflow. This is a short and good video summary of one-on-one conversations with remote employees Once again, I’m working my way through Advent of Code – Day 5…
It’s the American Thanksgiving version of FfF – here are a few interesting things I want to share this week. A colleague shared this interesting article on The Epistemology of Software Quality and I’m sharing it forward. I’ve never liked shift-* testing terms – but I’m warm to the idea of omni-testing If you or…
It’s been a big week… First off, who does not want a Cybertruck? Areti Panou had a nice post this week with Some Ideas for Reducing “Release Decision” Time I did a lot of reminiscing on past purchases when I found Amazon reports of all of my purchases back to 2006 I like pretty much everything…
Here we go again… A Video of my talk at Oredev last week is available I enjoyed this opinion on the invalidity of the Iron Triangle Similarly, I liked the conclusions of this article on 7 Leadership Lessons over 2.5 years Martin Fowler posted an insightful look at waterfall, iterative, and agile processes I was…
From Sweden this week – I’m attending and speaking at the Oredev conference this week. In fact, I had a few interesting conversations this week about the convergence of DevOps and quality. But…is DevOps a role or a culture? This podcast from CodingBlocks discusses just that. A few months old, but I enjoyed this article…
I’ve been in a funk this week – too many things I’m interested in, and not enough time to remain interested. My Introduction to Modern Testing course is available on the Ministry of Testing Website – so far, feedback has been quite positive. I had an old article of mine (I’m Tired of Finding Bugs)…
Another episode of “stuff I found interesting over the past week or so” I don’t know how you could have missed this, but Google confirms ‘quantum supremacy’ breakthrough Anecdotally, I knew this to be true, but according to this article, Over 60% Of Employees Are Happy At Startups—Far Outpacing FAANG And MSFT I wanted to…
Happy Friday – here’s stuff you should read. Techcrunch is running a series of articles on Unity. The first one is here – it’s unfortunately pay walled behind a techcrunch membership, but worth a read if you can get to it. Here’s a good question: Is It Time to Do Away with Scrum’s Product Owner…
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…