I love meeting new people and hearing about their hacks to productivity. My favourite part about chatting with Stefan Zavalin was that you don’t start going 8 hours with a Standing Desk on Day One – you do a little each day and keep building on that success. It sounds like common sense and it’s the reminder we need. The full episode is here.
The key to a good tweak is simple, do it at the right time and don’t blow up what exists. Switching tires that you have a hunch might do better on the last lap – good tweak. Wanting to replace the engine on the last lap – bad tweak. The key is doing it at the right time and not putting yourself into such a hole that you can’t recover if it doesn’t work it…
Regression testing is when you re-test everything in your suite to see if it still does the same thing it originally did (correctly). Sanity testing is the bare minimum testing that validates your core product to ensure it can do the most primal functions necessary to survive. Coverage looks at how far your testing extends – does it extend to everything you need it to reach? Leadership is knowing where, when, and how you need…
I’ve been on four projects in the last year that all had issues with Timezones, user locales, UTC, and everything else in between that relates to time and date calculations. Timezones are complex, but rarely do we deal with them at the beginning. Instead we deal with them when the first issue rolls in and then we have patch or hack the implementation because to fix them in the source would require cataclysmic changes that…
Fixing bugs isn’t the problem. Figuring out how they occur, now that’s the problem. That’s where we get hung up and where we spend the bulk of our time. That’s where we grind the gears trying to figure out what we are doing and what the next should be. And though this is the hardest of steps, it’s the most rewarding, we learn the most from them. If someone just gave us the answer and…