This blog post is all about the difference between operational & aspirational work, how does the waste disguise itself, why QA is so prone to over-doing, that QA is much more similar to other disciplines of engineering than one may think, how making things visual helped us a lot with stopping starting :)Part II of the series can be found here.So, how far did we go in the last part? Not that far to be honest, we've identified some ways to "free the mandays" & started implementing them - but this was just the beginning of our journey ...Increasing…
This is a blog post about blitzscaling, difference between marines & soldiers & police officers, which of them are getting the shit done, why do the "code ninjas" & "programming rockstars" fail and how you can turn that all into your advantage.Few days ago I've started reading "Blitzscaling" by Reid Hoffman. I'm not done yet, book is OK, I do agree with a lot of things (but I still do not with some), however today I've found something really worth sharing. A classification of attitudes (mindsets?) of people that are the most desired/beneficial at various stages of modern…
This blog post is all about: what's warsaw.ex and what kind of gap it will try to fill, why you (and any other software engineer) should care (about Elixir, even if you're specialised in a different tech already), who is behind that & who's invited and why I'm quite certain it will succeed this time ...Few days ago I've published an enigmatic tweet:It's coming ...https://t.co/wEzSQYL2Md#myelixirstatus #elixirlang #warsaw— Sebastian Gębski (@liveweird) October 10, 2018 As it's REALLY coming (soon), it's a good moment to share a bit more information.warsaw.exYes, Warsaw…
This blog post is all about how spoiled we are when it comes to our salaries :), why theory alone doesn't make you a "senior", that stepping back may be the best way to make a meaningful step forward, who is Salva Ballesta, why you need to start finishing & why skills make only 1/3 of proper candidate evaluation.Disclaimer: not all companies are alike, not all hiring managers are alike & there's always someone desperate enough to break all the rules :) What I present here is my point of view & the rules I follow personally. Feel free to…
This blog post is all about: Google's 20th birthday, that missionaries do not have to be founders, how does start-up compare to the plane, what does Jack Ma say about the day after tomorrow, what happens when survival is not the only focus anymore ...Google has just turned 20. Amazing, isn't it? At the moment of writing these words: Facebook is 14, Uber is 9, Instagram is 8. Eight or nine years is already quite a long period of time, isn't it? Yet, these companies are notoriously categorised as ... "start-ups". They are worth billions (or multitudes of billions ...), rock-solid, they…
This blog post is all about: psychoanalysis :), that we all behave (occasionally) like parents & children, if you adopt parent ego state - you're forcing your interlocutor to adopt child stance, sometimes to resolve discussion that seems irreversibly stuck - the easiest way is to map the interaction to psychoanalytic model/pattern.I love working with smart people - apart from all the other reasons, I keep learning new stuff from them on daily basis. That's how I've come up with the topic of this blog post (thanks Agnieszka!) - this stuff is so good, I couldn't resist sharing it…
In this post you'll read about the difference between writing automated tests & having testing automated, why testing framework or DSL used do not really matter, what does it mean "to free the mandays", how did we approach securing capacity for kick-starting test automation with a big hit.This is the 2nd post in the series. You can find the previous episode here.Just do it (not)!It's a very banal truth that it's very easy to create automated tests, but it's very hard to automate testing.Uhm, wait, what? What's the difference?I can easily create zillion of automated…
By learning this blog post you'll find out that neither Stoic != stoic nor Cynical != cynical, how Stoicism helped me to get out of depression, why celebrating small victories is important, what's "negative visualisation" & how Stoics' virtues do apply to modern engineering.If you've read any of my past blog posts before, you may have already realised that I tend to mix engineering with various non-obvious disciplines - starting with behavioural psychology, ending with Japanese movies, Zen meditation or Leonardo da Vinci ... Today I'd like to share some thoughts regarding the topic I find very appealing personally - how can…