Culture
On choosing software by “what is best for the business”
When people are discussing what language/framework/library to use for something, the general criteria people talk about is “what best solves the business problem.” This criteria is used to justify rewriting backend services in Go, rather than sticking with Python. Or not. It’s used explain why you wrote a new...
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Anxiety causes selfish behavior
BPS Research Digest is a great site, highly recommended for anyone interested in why people behave the way that they do. A little while ago, they reported on a study where anxious participants were more likely to cheat and excuse their own unethical behavior than the control group. When...
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Could employees choose their own manager?
Someone once brought up to me a plan about enabling employees to choose their own manager. The idea has stuck with me for a while, and being in my current position of authority I’ve pondered it more actively. I’ll use this post to collect my thoughts, and maybe present...
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Automated testing shows a respect for employees
In the tech-artists.org G+ community page there was a comment on a thread about unit testing: A key factor in TA tools is the speed at which we need to deliver them, and our audience is considerably smaller than, say, engine tools code. Therefor it becomes somewhat hard to...
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Change should be the ally of quality
In The Beauty of Testing, Steven Sinofsky writes: …great testers understand one the cardinal rules of software engineering—- change is the enemy of quality. This is not a cardinal rule. This is a outdated and obsolete mode of thinking. Change is how you discover great UX. Change is how...
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Undefining “technical debt”
For me, technical debt is defined pretty loosely as stuff you don’t like in the code and need to change to keep up velocity. However, I’ve seen lots of articles lately discussing a precise definition of “technical debt.” I would sum them up as: Technical debt is incurred intentionally....
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More effective interviews
David Smith over at baleful.net makes some interesting points about the length of most interviews: So mathematically, you will most likely get the highest confidence interval with: 1) Resume screen, 2) Phone interview, 3) In-person interviews 1-3. From the above, this should represent about 50% of the total causes,...
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We’re not so different, you and I
Ben Sandofsky wrote a post about why QA departments are still necessary, specifically with regards to mobile app development. He makes a good point: mobile apps create a distribution bottleneck that makes very rapid iteration impossible. I agree, and this is a good angle to think about. I would...
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The QA Department Mindset
From this post by Rands, titled “The QA Mindset”: At the current gig, there’s no QA department. […] My concern is that the absence of QA is the absence of a champion for aspects of software development that everyone agrees are important, but often no one is willing to...
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Long live Slack, down with egotistical email
We use Slack for team communication at Cozy. I struggled with the transition. When I reflected on my struggles, it made me better understand what a destructive format email is for workplace communication.
