My intent in writing a test is to satisfy myself by the cheapest means possible that the code does exactly what I think it does. I stress that this is my intent. Believe me, fifteen minutes on the internet will reveal to you a barrage of other possible intents. Surely, by now, it will be clear to you that i’m not an essentialist, but an extreme pragmatist w/strong existentialist leanings. My intent is to use the test to underpin my

Dear smart geeks: stop worrying so much about whether you’re gonna get it wrong, you definitely are gonna get it wrong. How do I approach this? Hmmmm. Okay, I see a couple of threads that need to be pulled together. This one’s gonna be clunky, I fear. Ahhh well. I’m definitely gonna get it wrong, too, I spoze. 🙂 the drive to be right is a powerful one. For some of us, perhaps, too powerful. But it does come naturally.

Think about your last huge unrequited crush. A real one, I m talking. A crush so big you go to sleep thinking of your future together, and wake up, ummm, guilty. The kind of crush that great romantic stories are made from, and for. The wobbly-knee d kind. And a complete non-starter: when I say unrequited, I m being clinical in an effort to minimize the likelihood of breaking out into laughter, as doctors and nurses in every ER around

When I think about teams, I think about them with a strange mixture of metaphors. First I see a thing that is in some respects like one of our classic pictures of an atom. There’s some particles in the middle, and some others that seem somewhat clearly "outside" like the electrons in their clouds. But that metaphor slips a little. In atoms, the electrons & protons & neutrons are separate and separated. In teams, it’s more like a swarm. So

Friend Matt asked me to elaborate on "the noobification of everything" in the geek trades. This is a floppy vague one as yet, so be prepared to play fast and loose. The so-far endless demand for new software has created a poor skills distribution curve into the trade. Divide ever-so-arbitrarily our ranks into 5, dreyfus-style or thereabouts. 1’s know where to put semi-colons. 5’s know as much as we all know about geekery. We have way too many 1’s for

Thinking this morning about strange borders, led there by a typically weird geepaw route. If u didn’t know, coaches sit around all the time and bitch about their clients. This is perfectly ordinary and maps onto all jobs I think. Such behavior is "good thing, but". It’s important to do and it’s risky as hell. Bitching about clients brings a mixed lot of positive benefit and negative ill. Co-bitching is bonding, for instance. A way for us share, a kind