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8 minute read - Monthly Summaries

November 2019 Content Summary

Dec 5, 2019

TLDR; Some notes on Tactically developing Software (tactical can refactor to strategic, when working strategically if you adopt tactical approaches for the Strategic components then you build up Tech Debt and rework). And content created as a result of journaling and learning over the month of November…

The content on Patreon is accessible for only $1 a month at patreon.com/eviltester. Supporters gain access to downloadable PDFs of the content and micro courses e.g. How I Test - Web App, Test Ability Audit and more

Chatterscan

One of my side projects is Chatterscan.com which I use as my main Twitter client to find posts with links in them, because that’s what I typically post to Twitter, and because I use Twitter to find out about ’new stuff’ I haven’t seen anywhere else.

It is interesting building an app on top of someone else’s API because it is a risk. Twitter might change their API, they might stop certain types of functionality working. It is one of the main reasons why Chatterscan.com is free and ‘mostly’ open source. I’ve seen too many tools and businesses ‘die’ because the API they were building on is deprecated.

I try not to take anything away from Twitter, so I still use Twitter to:

  • build lists
  • reply
  • check notifications
  • tweet

I don’t see any reason to replace Twitter. My aim is to augment it for my workflow.

  • view my lists more easily
  • only see tweets with links
  • collate tweets as markdown (e.g. as used in this post)

And I recently added a new function to help me ‘find related Tweets’. Rather than research ML, NLP, Tag Clouds etc. I simply allow the user to select some text on the page, and then search for it. I find that useful to find stuff related to the topic, when Twitter doesn’t have subjects, or ‘more like this tweet’ functionality.

While Chatterscan.com has become somewhat strategic i.e. it has its own URL, I maintain it, I use it as my main Twitter client. It operates in a very Tactical fashion i.e. Augmentation rather than Replacement.

When I add tools to help me with my testing, I approach the adoption of tooling in a very similar way. I want tools that Augment my ability test, rather than replace my ability to test.

I’m gradually tidying up the code for Chatterscan to reflect its more Strategic importance to my approach to Social Media. But that also reinforces my belief that we build tactically, and then as something becomes more important and more strategic, we spend more time making it more maintainable. I don’t class this as resolving Tech Debt, because initially a tactical approach is not accruing debt, it is adding value as fast as possible.

It is only when we have tooling, or approaches that are Strategic, that our adoption of tactical processes within that lead to the build up of ‘debt’ e.g. adding new functionality without automating Unit coverage, or incorporating some form of integration automating into the CI process.

Blog Posts For November 2019

Patreon Posts For November 2019

The following posts on Patreon were collated into a 59 page PDF that patreons on the $5 “scholar” tier have access for downloading to make it easier to catch up with the content. Patreon Summary Index

Twitter November 2019

I found a few interesting links that I posted to Twitter, which are listed below. This list is semi-automatically collated using Chatterscan.com

Note: I don’t summarise all the content that I release to social media so you might want to follow me there as well.

You can gain access to the content on Patreon for only $1 a month at patreon.com/eviltester. Supporters gain access to downloadable PDFs of the content and micro courses e.g. How I Test - Web App, Test Ability Audit and more


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