Five for Friday – 7/28/2023

I got off to a good start with the “Five for Friday” series, then fell off the wagon. One post is still in “Draft”, followed by a couple of slow news weeks. It led me to recall the Short Circuit movies from the 80s, and Johnny 5. Fortunately, there's been plenty of input since my last post. Last week, I volunteered with the Tech Journey Tech Camp, mentoring kids learning front-end web development. Next month, I'll mark 20 years spent in IT. I've gone from having my eyes glaze over when I look at code to helping multiple kids debug their code simultaneously. Admittedly, it's been a long, slow road, but I enjoyed spending my time teaching others some of what I've learned over the years. Now I'm sharing some of what I've learned in the past few weeks with you.

• Darryn Downey touches on a point from a previous “Five for Friday” post while trying to define the term Engineering Joy: “Happier people product better quality work.”
• A University of Copenhagen study says we're wasting up to 20% of our time on computer problems. Anyone who follows Ben Simo (AKA Quality Frog) on Twitter may have already surmised this. Every time he encounters an error in the software he uses, he shares it publicly. His ultimate conclusion: “Software is 💩.”
• James Thomas created a README document derived from a Myers-Briggs workshop, where he outlines how he sees his role, and how he likes to work. I'm working with a leadership coach to do something similar, helping to define/refine my personal vision, mission, and values to help me find work that is aligned with where I want to take my organization and my career. I think alignment is the key to retaining employees and putting them to their best use–somewhere that aligns with how they see themselves and where they want to go in their careers.
• Everyone suffers from a fear of failure, but we learn more from failure than from success. Thomas Edison famously said, “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” Learn about Turning Fear of Failure into Increments of Curiosity by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.
• The Association for Software Testing is crowd-sourcing a book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester, which aims to respond to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective. I like to read some of the various responses to the questions that are posed about testing for this book. In this post, Chris Kenst responds to the idea that “Testers are the gatekeepers of quality.” Spoiler alert: No, they are not.

Thanks for reading!!