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Heuristic

A collection of 7 issues

Getting Paid to Learn

Picking up experience on the job can be great (for example learning about SEO, application monitoring or observability) but all things being equal, it shouldn’t come at the expense of the many other ways we learn. Without the support to continuously learn new things we get stuck in jobs

Do things that don’t scale

If you can find someone with a problem that needs solving and you can solve it manually, go ahead and do that for as long as you can, and then gradually automate the bottlenecks. – Paul Graham With the title of Automation Engineer it might seem like automating bottlenecks is “my

How to Write a Good Bug Report, use RIMGEN

RIMGEN is an acronym and mnemonic (or memory aid) to help us remember the elements of a good bug report. It can be used to help anyone write a better bug report or review existing bug reports looking to make improvements. In general my preference with reporting bugs is to:

Recognizing a problem in eBay’s iPad app

I’ve been buying and selling things on eBay for more than a decade. In the last few years I’ve spent more time using the iPhone app but for some reason I wasn’t using the iPad app. I figured it was time, so I installed the eBay app,

First principle reasoning

When I was young I remember wanting to be an awesome football player like Joe Montana, or an FBI agent working on the X-Files like Fox Mulder. These days I want to have the skills to identify and solve problems like Elon Musk. Musk is an interesting person. He’s

Low and High Intensity Learning

Paul Graham in his essay Wealth says startups are a way of compressing a whole working life into a few years. You work at a very high intensity for a short period of time (say four years) instead of the normal low intensity for a long period of time (say

My Tester's Commitments

My job is to help programmers look good; to support them as they create quality; to ease that burden instead of adding to it. In that spirit, I make the following commitments: 1. I provide a service. You are an important client of that service. I am not satisfied unless