Jason L.

I'm going to post a few challenges I have had as a software QA. I should be relaxing today but those that know me, know my brain is always in thirty places at once. To developers: Trust your QA. Y'all don't know how many times I've heard, "Well, it works on my local". I don't care. In the test environment, it breaks. I do my due diligence to investigate why, present evidence in logs and from the database, present recordings, and meticulously document steps of reproduction and results. And even after, I still get, "It works on my local". Get off the dang local. NO ONE knows this software, app, platform, etc. better than the QA because we live it more than anyone else does. To business analysts: I know you all are overwhelmed. But please stop copying and pasting Acceptance Criteria for similar features. It makes a mess for developers and QA because the AC doesn't match or conflicts with not only the developed feature but integration as well. Which brings me to my next point... What QA is: Everyone thinks of us as just testers. I am sick of that. I spend half my time working with the product owner, BAs, and Devs, just making sure the AC reflects the solution needing to be resolved. I can't tell you how many times I have had to address with the BAs conflicts in a story over AC, nonsensical AC, WTF verbiage, etc. So then the developers get confused and we are in long meetings addressing what is messed up. We are here to help you ask the questions you didn't think to ask. We don't just test..... we look at future issues too. We like process improvements. Automation: Stop asking me to automate a one-off feature test that hasn't even gone through UAT yet. It's time wasted. Too many companies do this. Might as well give me the day off for the time it takes to do that because the automation is useless after UAT. Learn the purpose of automation. Product Owner: When I tell you before a demo not to demo certain things because there are still issues, don't shred me after the demo because you decided to demo them anyway and they break. I TOLD YOU not to do that, and why. Data: QA worst nightmare. My last position I would get two test records to test against 20 AC when I first started. I said "Helz no". I built up a catalog of test records I could use, positive and negative, as I progressed because I want multiple records against every AC. Which I often shared with the developers for their unit tests who loved it. QA needs data, all. You give me two records, don't yell at me that coverage isn't thorough. Probably sounded more a rant. But I'm opinionated. Where many QA are not. And these are common issues. Want to improve QA, improve the above.

54

34 Comments

4 Things You Should Put in Your Daily Dev Log To harvest meaningful patterns from your dev log, you’ll need to capture the same things daily. I’ve been engineering software for 25 years, and I’ll share what I’ve routinely kept in mine. Your context is different, so your list will be also. Just make sure you capture the same things daily. Use this list as a skeleton to start from. It’s easier when you aren’t starting from a blank page! Pull Requests I keep track of every PR I submit, approve, or merge. Almost any work product I deliver or review flows through Git. My lists of PRs serve as a personal task-level kanban board of work in progress that I am connected to. These help me easily reconstruct a story of what I’ve done throughout the week. Personal Interactions I make note of every personal interaction I have, scheduled or otherwise. In addition to these notes, I keep a page for each person, and I link to that page from my daily notes. As I note patterns of interaction with a person, I’ll describe those patterns on their page. Over time I build a library of every person I’ve collaborated with and what we worked on together. Project Actions I keep a running narrative of the things I’m working on. I keep a section for each thing I’m working on. These might be at the product or story level - it just depends. Each time I hit a stopping point or interruption, I make a note of what I’ve been doing and what I plan to do next. Guess what I use to inform my daily standup updates? Perplexing Puzzles I make a note of everything that surprises me. These could be strange program behaviors, blockers, production issues - anything unexpected. As I review these periodically, I ask myself how I can use what I’ve learned to improve my mental models. Hopefully this list helps you get past the starting line. Do this faithfully for several months and see where it takes you!

8

8 Comments

Posts that ATTEMPT to classify Software Developers get it wrong ALL THE TIME. Here's why... There is no 'customer focused engineer' or '10x ninja'. There are only two types: 1. Developers with no side projects. 2. Developers with unfinished side projects.

3

1 Comment

Can someone explain to me how to get "more experience"? I have 16 years of full stack software engineering experience, mostly in C# .Net 4.2 through 8, including .Net Core 2.x & 3.x, along with WCF, WPF, Winforms, Razor/Blazor, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, with Entity Framework, Dapper, Linq, SQL Server, MySQL, SQLite, Oracle, NoSql, and other databases. And a few of those years include a combination of Java, PHP, and C/C++. I've also used MarkDown, PowerShell, MVC framework, Swashbuckle/Swagger, Newtonsoft, JSON .Net, TopShelf, and a variety of testing frameworks. But apparently that's not enough. In the past 3 years alone, I've learned ReactJS, TypeScript, Xamarin, XAML, Maui, NodeJS, Terraform, AWS, and Azure, and I'm currently learning Angular, but that doesn't cover the 3-5 years of experience jobs want. I've learned some of these skills through jobs, but also some on my own. Except that as often as companies want us to learn these skills outside of work, they only count professional experience when it comes to hiring. My last interview said I needed more experience, as if the previously mentioned 16 years wasn't enough, and neither was the 15 years of computer repair and networking before that, which their interview questions also covered. So if no one is willing to hire because people don't already have experience, how are we supposed to get the experience? And don't say "open source projects", because they don't count as professional experience. Or do I have to take a 50% pay cut to take an "entry level" job that still requires 3-5 years of experience that I somehow still don't have? People are quick to say that "no one wants to work anymore" when they can't get hired, but they never seem to think "businesses aren't willing to teach anymore" when they refuse to hire people. Why? Is it that we are so conditioned to think that it's always the individuals fault for not living up to expectations, instead of the businesses fault for setting unrealistic and ever changing expectations? So, I ask again, how can I get the required experience when employers refuse to hire unless I already have experience?

2

Regarding software engineers the concept of "seniority" seems to be being discussed recently more than before and I wonder why. There seems to be a shift in the industry that companies hiring engineers had raised the "acceptance bar" so junior/medior engineers have it tougher than before to even get past the door (companies want experienced engineers and superheroes only) ... but then inside the companies the hired seniors are given repetitive and subpar assignments yet have no one to train / upskill / support around them. This seems like a short-term cost optimization that will have dire consequences in the future as seniority is built up by collaboration and learning from others (aka mentoring/coaching). Keypoint: The main leverage of more senior software engineers is they can help others become more senior and open up their potential. For that they need juniors/mediors around them and enough space to do so. Just thinking out loud... Anyone willing to share his views? #senior #staff #principal #mentoring #coaching #pairing #mobbing #leadbyexample

16

1 Comment

How can you manage a software engineering team when you are not a software engineer yourself? What has helped me immensely over the years: First off, yes, I have an engineering team under my leadership. Of course, I am unable to do code reviews or advise functionally. So how do I do it? A list of points, with some nods to musical pieces. Beyonce, All the Single Ladies - NOT I am not alone in this endeavor. I have co-functional leads who I can ask and get advice from anytime. My work would otherwise be impossible. Vybz Kartel, I Can I used to work in functions that often resembled PO work. Plus, I have worked with engineering teams in close collaboration for over a decade now. So I understand and can steer the dynamics. Machel Montano, Endless Wuk I am capable of understanding the business side. If I know why and where we are going I can translate that to the team and beyond. Lisa, Rockstar Believe it or not - I can put together a couple of lines of code. I have worked on some smaller, private projects before. Do I code in my free time? No. But I have seen what the basic structures are and applied them. Danagog, Hakuna Matata I can listen and listen well. I can advise based on my professional and life experience. I have empathy in droves. I can understand the lived realist of a developer, a PO, a designer, an agile coach. Have you seen or experienced non-technical managers? What was that like? Would you be open to be managed by a manager who is not able to functionally feedback you?

38

7 Comments

Alright, I used up a 2-week free trial of Cursor IDE. My experience is solid. I think I'll pay $20/m if I don't find anything better. The next ups in my list are: - GitHub copilot - Continue.dev - Cody from Sourcegraph - Tabnine - Zed Which is the best AI coding assistence in your opinion? 🤔 #data #coding #productivity

35

11 Comments

Every time 10x engineers come up I think of the times I was briefly considered a 10x engineer by management. There are times I have come through and apparently pulled a big, complex solution out of thin air. I say "apparently" because that's what they thought. They didn't see the weeks of preparation and teamwork that went into a sudden, surprising outcome for them. They started expecting miracles every other day or week. This leads to burnout on the developer's part. Managers tend to think that the developer is holding back after this. They refuse to acknowledge the silent work and painstaking little habits that lead to large success. This situation never ends well. If you want 10x engineers it's likely you would not know what to look for, nor would you be able to handle them if you happened to stumble into one.

3

This is a great blog entry on the "devaluation of frontend" development. https://lnkd.in/gDuGeh7n You should read it. A few passages that jumped out at me: "We often aren’t included at the beginning stages, where we could easily identify costly accessibility, performance, and user experience mistakes; we’re brought in at the end, when things have already been built and it’s too late to change anything significantly." - THIS - I had a job for awhile where I was treated as a fixer/styler in spite of 5+ years at that point as a professional developer working in both backend and frontend languages. It was like getting very skilled at UI work made folks skeptical of all of my backend and regular programming skills. That was in spite of having a math degree and starting my software engineering career as a python developer. Meanwhile, you wouldn't believe the skepticism that we encounter when trying to tell folks that there is a "right" way to build the frontend so that you don't have to go back and fix accessibility problems or cross device issues. Because frontend skills are so devalued, it is very common to just expect a backend engineer to do them regardless of whether they have ANY skill in that area. I've seen it happen many, many times that a person with sometimes LESS than entry level skills on the frontend are just assigned to build new frontend features or make a major UI update. I mean it is literally common for someone who could NOT get hired as a frontend developer to be assigned to build a major new frontend/UI update. To use the building analogy, it's like you suddenly decided your plumber installing your sinks and tubs should be able to handle the installation of windows, doors, shingles, trim and paint. And this bit (https://lnkd.in/gMdmebAj): "Writing CSS seems to be regarded much like taking notes in a meeting, complete with the implicit sexism and devaluation of the note taker’s importance in the room." Yes, this. And guess what? Bad HTML and CSS can eat up your time and resources just as surely as any other part of the codebase. But now that you are putting someone on it who doesn't have those skills, like a very expensive backend software engineer with more than a decade of experience, you may be taking many times longer to find and resolve the problem than if you had put someone on it who works with it every day, or that was actually an expert. I mean should you put someone on that UI bug who cost $60/hour and can fix it in 10 minutes or someone that costs $100/hour and can fix it in 6 hours to a week? I am NOT joking about those times. Expertise and skills in one area of the stack, does not magically jump over to others.

4

Watched a portion of the old Brian Will video on why OOP is bad (https://lnkd.in/epvfRpPR), and bombed out fairly hard when he came out with the puzzling assertion that messages between objects properly speaking shouldn't include object references. Well, there goes your visitor pattern; there goes the UI staple of registering objects with some event bus for callbacks when particular events happen. Is there some source in the literature (Alan Kay, I guess) for this odd restriction? It seems like a basic misapprehension: sure, messages should transfer representations of internal state and not haphazardly leak references to the state itself (otherwise external parties can mutate it without going through the owning object's protocol), but it's also a pretty basic affordance of message-passing systems that the addresses of things that can receive messages are first-class things that can be passed around (compare URIs in REST, or channels in pi calculus). The other odd assertion was that permitting many objects in an arbitrary graph to hold a reference to an object and access its methods was as bad as having global shared state. It fairly obviously isn't: the ability to exercise the protocol for reading or updating a particular bit of state can get passed around to wherever it needs to be, but isn't immediately available to everything, and pretty much the whole point is that you're passing a pointer to the protocol, not the rights to inspect and modify the data structures it guards. It seems that Will wants to argue for a hierarchical flow of messages down a DAG-shaped stack of routines and subroutines with a single controlling root procedure, rather than a potentially cyclic call graph with objects fielding requests from all angles. In practice that's what your average Spring Boot service actually does of course: controller to service to persistence or external client layer, and back up again. But (and this is an argument for a future post) that's because the average Spring Boot service is fundamentally procedural code, with a bit of indirection between modules. Other topologies are possible, and appropriate for particular use cases. The most generous reading I can give of Will's argument is that OOP offers more flexibility than perhaps a majority of actually existing programs really need, and we'd be happier and less burdened by object bureaucracy if we wrote those programs in a more constrained idiom. I actually think that's kind of true, but haven't got to the bottom of what it means in practice just yet.

2

Ok but for real this time (see yesterday's post): I'm a #StaffEngineer. That means I: ✅ Listen. ✅ Ensure our SDLC is solid. ✅ Mentor anyone looking to learn a subject I have expertise in. ✅ Am VERY aware of how fallible my own code is. ✅ Am ALWAYS open to feedback of any kind. ✅ Oh and also, I guess I manage our product from a tech perspective. And I DON'T: 🚫 Lord my experience over anyone, ever. 🚫 Ignore input from anyone, for any reason. 🚫 Use my position as leverage. 🚫 Look down on anyone for asking a genuine question. #code #leadership #SoftwareEngineer

7

I have an alternative (well... extension) to this one which is to keep a sheet of all work you do as an employee that means something to you. "means something to you" can be a brag, but it also can be a mistake, or something important you learned. It can be a major launch that you led, or a pesky but important bug that you fixed and nobody otherwise would noticed. Even a critical code review that raised the bar for a commit counts! Then, I take it even further and ask employees to seek feedback from their peers on this list, making sure they have a 360 degree view on their work (did I capture this accurately? do you have other observations on my work that I missed?) Employees that do this find it much easier to get a promotion, because 1/ I have a full list of things they did, 2/ I have a full list of things they grew from, 3/ I have plenty of peer feedback and perspective already documented to support the data. It doesn't write the promo doc itself, but boy, it helps A LOT.

13

3 Comments

"Curiosity over tenure" -- use quality telemetry in your traces to make debugging accessible. Empower curious folks to debug, not just the most tenured person on the team/company. Metrics are great... they're cheap, enable high data retention, but they're coarse... too coarse to understand what's happening in your system. If you're solely reliant on metrics, you'll need lots of intuition and tenure to understand what's going on in the system. "Oh... it's the cache" says the hero on the team peering over a graph, and doing some inaccessible pattern matching. It looks cool, but it's not scalable. Adding lots of telemetry to your traces ensures anyone with a curious mind can understand what's going on in your system.

3

Jr. Devs, When you are sitting in that interview chair trying not to say the wrong thing and trying to remember all the stuff you’ve been told about how to interview well, don’t forget this one thing that should give you at least a little more confidence. You're not the only one being interviewed. You may think… duh, there are tons of candidates for this job. However, that’s not what I’m talking about. You are interviewing the company. Most Jr. Devs don’t think like this because, frankly, most Jr. Devs are just trying to get a job and they often don’t care or don’t consider the company or the culture they end up in. I’ve spent a lot of time on the DevMentorDave YouTube channel recently talking about mentoring and the need for it in our organizations. But that’s only one part of finding the right fit. The company is looking for candidates they think will fit what they need. Notice I said, ‘NEED”. They don’t just hire because it’s fun (it’s not). They need someone and you need to make sure they are a good fit for YOU before accepting an offer or before leaving the interview. Don’t just ask questions you found on a website or were given by a recruiter. Think about what matters to you as an employee and as an individual and ask questions that will impact how you work and impact your success and future. That level of confidence and interaction in the interview may just set you apart from the pack, even if your dev skills are the same as all the other candidates. #juniordeveloper #mentoring #interview 

12

1 Comment

Two things jump out at me: accountability and specialization. My first insight into specialization was working on a union construction site many years ago. Lots of union rules about who could and could not do certain tasks, i.e., lots of specialization. Let's say we needed to move a pallet from Point A to Point B. That required a Teamster to drive the forklift, with certain exceptions depending on what was on the pallet, in which case a member of the Operators union was required. If the right person was not available, it didn't matter how many guys were standing around and knew how to drive a forklift, the pallet didn't get moved. So I've always seen specialization as a bottleneck. Holding people accountable: "I need you to ship that by November 1 and I'm holding you accountable." It doesn't work that way. There's no accountability without volition. You can't hold other people accountable, you can only hold yourself accountable. And the more you hold people accountable, the more infantile they become.

2

🚀 10 Signs You're a 10x Engineer (and don't even know it!) 🧑‍💻 1. You've googled "how to exit vim" more times than you'd like to admit. 2. Your commit messages are works of art. Sometimes they even rhyme. 3. You've fixed a critical bug by adding a single semicolon. 4. Your code comments are a perfect blend of humor and despair. 5. You've mastered the art of looking busy while waiting for your code to compile. 6. Your rubber duck has seen things no duck should ever see. 7. You can explain technical concepts using only memes. 8. Your coffee intake directly correlates with your git commits. 9. You've had heated debates about tabs vs. spaces. 10. You've written "it works on my machine" so many times, you're considering getting it tattooed. Bonus: You're reading this and nodding vigorously! 😄

82

17 Comments