Developer Automation

This is just a quick note to say I’m taking some time off blogging on this blog. I recently bought a course to help with monetizing blogging.  I’m going to be spending my efforts on learning and working through that course.  Stay tuned!  I will post updates in the future. Thanks to all of my […]

Have you heard the phrase “Fail Fast”? Several people have used failure as a means to learn and do things better. Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert comic, wrote a book called How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. The New Yorker has written about it. The Economist has also written about […]

Your Excuse May Be Valid… Everybody has an excuse.  Everyone has a reason it isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. A lot of times, these are legitimate reasons. The code isn’t tested well enough because we don’t have time. We don’t have the proper hardware to test. [insert another excuse here] The problem with […]

The Excuses There are many excuses given for why a developer or organization can’t start automation.  While most have some truth to them, you cannot expect for it to ‘magically’ happen.  You must be proactive.  Determining what that means basically boils down into where to start. If you or someone else is not proactive to […]

The Problem You are getting ready to release your product.  All features are finished, and it is time to test. If a lot of your tests are manual, you must run through a set of manual steps, which takes time.  After a certain period of manual steps, the product is ready to be deployed. That’s […]

Installing Software Is Fun… eh… Monotonous You start a new job.  The laptop needs some software. A new server needs to be setup.  Packages must be installed. You do this once and it’s no big deal.  Once you’ve done it five, ten, or even more times, it gets old very quickly. Not only is it […]

No Users of Your Automation You’ve worked hours/days/weeks/months to come up with the perfect automated solution.  It has the potential to save a lot of time.  There’s just one problem: no one will use it! This can be extremely frustrating.  A perfect tool exists for some problem, but no one uses it.  How can you […]

What Are Blockers? In scrum, a blocker is anything that is outside your control that is impeding progress on your task.  Usually this has to do with a dependency on another team in the company. For example, suppose you write test software to validate hardware’s functionality.  You have some dependency on the hardware team in […]

Music as a Tool for Focusing Have you played many video games? If you’ve played at least some strategy or RPG games, you may notice the background theme.  Usually this is some music that plays for a few minutes then repeats.  So if you are stuck on a level, you will end up hearing that […]

What Is Technical Debt? Every time some software is designed and written, decisions are made (consciously or unconsciously) about its quality. Does the code have unit tests? Does it have some automated system testing? Was TDD used to design that piece of code? If quality is not put into the initial release due to pressing […]