Testing Goals for 2019

All year round, I’ve spent some considerable time thinking about where I am and where I want go next. Where I am is where there’s some sort of stability, a status quo. Where I want to go next is some place where there are unknowns.

It would be interesting to experience a full-time remote gig, in a role that challenges my skills in either building automated scripts or mobile app development. But even though a full-time gig, it should still enable me to work on personal side hustles.

After increasing my overall strength to at least twice since the start of the year, I’d like to surpass that achievement in the coming year. That likely means making better food choices and improving cooking skills.

I want to build my portfolio site from the ground up and get more acquainted with web development.

And it would be great if I can finish the art project I started this year, to complement the portfolio site.

I believe I did well with my testing goals this year. My lifestyle got better, but I’m not where I want to be just yet.

Takeaways from Timothy Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Body”

This year, I decided I was going to get better at exercising. To do that, I thought about reading a few books to give myself an idea on how to go about it. One such book was Timothy Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Body“, which is a goldmine of content. In it are suggested exercises that gets the job done, walkthroughs, and some science of how things work. But the book is so much more than just a guide on physical exercises. There’s ideas on self-experimentation, adherence, being proactively skeptical, harajuku moments, a slow-carb diet, and more.

Here are some favorite takeaways:

• Science starts with educated (read: wild-ass) guesses. Then it’s all trial and error. Sometimes you predict correctly from the outset. More often, you make mistakes and stumble across unexpected findings, which lead to new questions. If you want to sit on the sidelines and play full-time skeptic, suspending actions until a scientific consensus is reached, that’s your choice. But don’t use skepticism as a thinly veiled excuse for inaction or remaining in your comfort zone. Be skeptical, but for the right reason: because you’re looking for the most promising option to test in real life. Be proactively skeptical, not defensively skeptical.
• We break commitments to ourselves with embarrassing regularity. How can someone trying to lose weight binge on an entire pint of ice cream before bed? How can even the most disciplined of executives fail to make 30 minutes of time per week for exercise? How can someone whose marriage depends on quitting smoking pick up a cigarette? Simple: logic fails.
• Take adherence seriously: will you actually stick with this change until you hit your goal? If not, find another method, even if it’s less effective and less efficient. The decent method that you follow is better than the perfect method you quit.
• Self-experimentation can be used by non-experts to (a) see if the experts are right and (b) learn something they don’t know. When you study your own problem (e.g. acne), you care more about finding a solution than others are likely to care.
• If results are fast and measurable, self-discipline isn’t needed.
• If you want to be more confident or effective, rather than relying on easily-defeated positive thinking and mental gymnastics, learn to run faster, lift more than your peers, or lose those last ten pounds. It’s measurable, it’s clear, you can’t lie to yourself. It therefore works. The Cartesian separation of mind and body is false. They’re reciprocal. Start with the precision of changing physical reality and a domino effect will often take care of the internal.
• Job not going well? Company having issues? Some idiot making life difficult? If you add ten laps to your swimming, or if you cut five seconds off your best mile time, it can still be a great week. Controlling your body puts you in life’s driver’s seat.
• Recreation is for fun. Exercise is for producing changes. Don’t confuse the two.
• People suck at following advice. Even the most effective people in the world are terrible at it. There are two reasons:
  • Most people have an insufficient reason for action. The pain isn’t painful enough. It’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have.
  • There are no reminders. No consistent tracking = no awareness = no behavioral change. Consistent tracking, even if you have no knowledge of fat-loss or exercise, will often beat advice from world-class trainers.
• For a long time, I’ve known that the key to getting started down the path of being remarkable in anything is to simply act with the intention of being remarkable. If I want a better-than-average career, I can’t simply go with the flow and get it. Most people do just that: they wish for an outcome but make no intention-driven actions toward that outcome. If they would just do something most people would find that they get some version of the outcome they’re looking for. That’s been my secret. Stop wishing and start doing.

Lessons from Mark Manson’s “Models: Attract Women Through Honesty”

I picked up Mark Manson’s “Models: Attract Women Through Honesty” because I was intrigued by the title and because I am at a time in my life where I’d like to meet more interesting women. It did not disappoint. The book was insightful, and, like other compelling reads, it pushes me to look hard at myself and how I’ve been living my life, this time particularly on the subject of women. The concepts of neediness and vulnerability are, for me, the main takeaways.

Here are just a few of the noteworthy lines from the book:

• In our post-industrial, post-feminist world, we lack a clear model of what an attractive man is. Centuries ago, a man’s role and duty was power and protection. Decades ago, it was to provide. But now? We’re not quite sure. We are either the first or second generation of men to grow up without a clear definition of our social roles, and without a model of what it is to be strong and attractive men.
• Seduction is an interplay of emotions. Your movement or lack of movement reflects and alters emotions, not the words. Words are the side-effect. Sex is the side-effect. The game is emotions, emotions through movement.
• In surveys among literally tens of thousands of women, across all cultures, ethnicities, age groups, and socio-economic standing, and even time periods, there’s one universal quality in men that they all find desirable: social status and access to resources. The amount in which they desire it varies from culture to culture and from age group to age group, but the desire for it is universal.
• Social status is determined by how you behave around other people, how other people behave around you, and how you treat yourself.
• Female arousal is somewhat narcissistic in nature. Women are turned on by being wanted, by being desired. The more physical assertiveness you pursue a woman with, the more aroused she becomes — sometimes even if she wasn’t interested in you to begin with.
• How attractive a man is is inversely proportional to how emotionally needy he is. The more emotionally needy he is in his life, the less attractive he is and vice-versa. Neediness is defined by being more highly invested in other people’s perceptions of you than your perception of yourself.
• All people eventually return to their baseline levels of investment. And until one is able to permanently alter his baseline level of identity investment in themselves, they will continue to attract the same types of women, and end up in the same failed relationships. Permanent change to one’s investment and neediness in their relationships with women is hard and a process that encompasses all facets of one’s life. But it’s a worthwhile journey. As a man, it may be the most worthwhile journey. And the key to it is probably something you wouldn’t expect. In fact, it’s something that most men turn their nose up to when they hear it. It’s vulnerability.
• Making yourself vulnerable doesn’t just mean being willing to share your fears or insecurities. It can mean putting yourself in a position where you can be rejected, saying a joke that may not be funny, asserting an opinion that may offend others, joining a table of people you don’t know, telling a woman that you like her and want to date her. All of these things require you to stick your neck out on the line emotionally in some way. You’re making yourself vulnerable when you do them. In this way, vulnerability represents a form of power, a deep and subtle form of power. A man who’s able to make himself vulnerable is saying to the world, “I don’t care what you think of me; this is who I am, and I refuse to be anyone else.” He’s saying he’s not needy and that he’s high status.
• Show your rough edges. Stop trying to be perfect. Expose yourself and share yourself without inhibition. Take the rejections and lumps and move on because you’re a bigger and stronger man. And when you find a woman who loves who you are (and you will), revel in her affection.
• The biggest criticism of showing interest to a woman that you want to be with is that it immediately shows you as highly invested in her responses. When you say, “You’re cute and I wanted to meet you,” that translates roughly to, “Hi, I want to be with you and am officially invested in the prospect of it happening.” What they miss though is the sub-communication going on underneath what’s actually being said. The sub-communication is, “I’m totally OK with the idea of you rejecting me, otherwise I would not be approaching you in this manner.”
• True honesty is only possible when it is unconditional. The truth is only the truth when it is given as a gift — when nothing is expected in return. When I tell a girl that she is beautiful, I say it not expecting anything in return. Whether she rejects me or falls in love with me isn’t important in that moment. What’s important is that I’m expressing my feelings to her. I will give compliments only when I am honestly inspired to give them, and usually after already meeting a woman and displaying to her that I’m willing to disagree with her, willing to be rejected by her and willing to walk away from her if it ever comes to that.

Five People and Their Thoughts (Part 8)

Sharing a new batch of engaging videos from people I follow, which I hope you’ll come to like as I do:

• Workarounds (by Alan Richardson, about workarounds, how you can use them in testing, custom-using tools, moving boilerplate to the appendix, bypassing processes that gets in the way, understanding risks and value, technical skills, and taking control of your career)
• 100% Coverage is Too High for Apps! (by Kent Dodds, on code coverage, what it tells you, as well as what it does not tell you)
• Open Water Swimming (by Timothy Ferriss, about fears, habits, total immersion swimming, Terry Laughlin, compressing months of conventional training into just a few days, and the power of micro-successes)
• How To Stop Hating Your Tests (by Justin Searls, representing Test Double, on doing only three things for tests, avoiding conditionals, consistency, apparent test purpose, redundant test coverage, optimizing feedback loops, false negatives, and building better workflows)
• Meaning of Life (by Derek Sivers, about a classic unsolvable problem, using time wisely, making good choices, making memories, the growth mindset, inherent meaning, and a blank slate)

Lessons Learned from Scott Adams’ “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big”

Last week I had a lovely time reading “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big” by cartoonist Scott Adams. His views on success and happiness, and his formula for increasing the odds of success through failures are intriguing, based on his life experiences. He shares ideas about goals and systems, skills, happiness, priorities, and personal energy, which provides a guide for living well. Some of those ideas are ones I already exercise, while others have provided answers to goals that have failed me in the past as well as reasons to why I’ve acted a certain way before. It’s refreshing to learn something new about existing patterns of behavior.

Here are some favorite quotes from the book:

• A goal is a specific objective that you either achieve or don’t sometime in the future. A system is something you do on a regular basis that increases your odds of happiness in the long run. If you do something every day, it’s a system. If you’re waiting to achieve it someday in the future, it’s a goal. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous pre-success failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy. Goals only make sense if you also have a system that moves you in the right direction.
• One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task. For example, when I first wake up, my brain is relaxed and creative. The thought of writing a comic is fun, and it’s relatively easy because my brain is in exactly the right mode for that task. I know from experience that trying to be creative in the mid-afternoon is a waste of time. By 2:00 PM all I can do is regurgitate the ideas I’ve seen elsewhere. At 6:00 AM I’m a creator, and by 2:00 PM I’m a copier.
• The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main metric: my energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities. Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary stress, getting enough sleep, and all of the obvious steps. But it also means having something in my life that makes me excited to wake up.
• It’s useful to think of your priorities in terms of concentric circles, like an archery target. In the center is your highest priority: you. If you ruin yourself, you won’t be able to work on any other  priorities. So taking care of your own health is job one. The next ring – and your second-biggest priority is economics. That includes your job, your investments, and even your house. You might wince at the fact that I put economics ahead of your family, your friends, and the rest of the world, but there’s a reason. If you don’t get your personal financial engine working right, you place a burden on everyone from your family to the country. Once you are both healthy and financially sound, it’s time for the third ring: family, friends, and lovers. Good health and sufficient money are necessary for a base level of happiness, but you need to be right with your family, friends, and romantic partners to truly enjoy life.
• There’s a formula for success. You can manipulate your odds of success by how you choose to fill out the variables in the formula. The formula, roughly speaking, is that every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Good + Good > Excellent. If you think extraordinary talent and a maniacal pursuit of excellence are necessary for success, I say that’s just one approach, and probably the hardest. When it comes to skills, quantity often beats quality.
• I find it helpful to see the world as a slot machine that doesn’t ask you to put money in. All it asks is your time, focus, and energy to pull the handle over and over. A normal slot machine that requires money will bankrupt any player in the long run. But the machine that has rare yet certain payoffs, and asks for no money up front, is a guaranteed winner if you have what it takes yo keep yanking until you get lucky. In that environment, you can fail 99% of the time, while knowing success is guaranteed. All you need to do is stay in the game long enough.
• The single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want. I’m contrasting that with the more common situation, in which you might be able to do all the things you want, but you can’t often do them when you want. The timing of things can be more important than the intrinsic value of the things. It’s hard to become rich enough to buy your own private island, but, relatively speaking, it’s easier to find a job with flexible hours. A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule. Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.
• No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day. You’d feel like an idiot for suffering so many unhappy days while not knowing the cure was so accessible.
• The happiness formula:
  • Eat right
  • Exercise
  • Get enough sleep
  • Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it)
  • Work toward a flexible schedule
  • Do things you can steadily improve at
  • Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself)
  • Reduce daily decisions to routine
• Always remember that failure is your friend. It is the raw material of success. Invite it in. Learn from it. And don’t let it leave until you pick its pocket.

The Harajuku Moment

On a chapter from Timothy Ferriss‘s book titled “The 4-Hour Body“, he talks about something significant called the Harajuku moment, described as:

.. an epiphany that turns a nice-to-have into a must-have.

The expression actually came from a realization Chad Fowler (programmer, writer, co-organizer of RubyConf and RailsConf) had in Harajuku with friends some time in the past, while window shopping and lamenting how unfashionable he was. He noticed the tone of helplessness in his own words as he talked about his obesity, and felt angry at himself for being an idiot who went with the flow, making excuses, for many years.

After that defining moment, he turned things around and lost nearly a 100 pounds.

Two years in a row of annual physical exams (2015-2016), I was told that I have hypertension. The previous years I also felt that I tire quickly, becoming more so as the days went by. I’m just over 30, skinny, and believed that I should still be in my prime but was not. I wondered why things turned out the way they did, and eventually recognized that existing habits did not help me become the healthy person I thought I was.

I’m now performing weight-lifts and body-weight exercises 4 times a week, and is in my best shape in the past 10 years or so. What’s interesting is that making the change was actually fun and somewhat easy, very unlike the grueling and exasperating experience I initially thought it would be. I plan to keep things up, gaining as much strength as I can and keeping body fat percentage minimal.

What the Harajuku moment tells us is that, often, on most days, we have insufficient reason to take action. We only have nice-to-haves. We tell ourselves it would be nice to get fit, go on a date with that someone we really like, have a well refactored code, travel internationally, or learn a new skill. But the nice-to-haves do not give us enough pain to move forward. That’s why we sometimes feel we’re stuck in a rut.

Our nice-to-haves must first turn to must-haves before we can take advice and act.

One-on-Ones

The past few years I managed in-office software testing knowledge-sharing and tools-tutoring sessions for junior testers at work. It’s not something fancy, sessions are minimal but somewhat regular, and my goal was only to pass on some of the interesting lessons I’ve come to believe to be true based on studying and experience. I want them to become curious about the industry they’re in and I want them to take ownership of their own growth as testers.

I’ve always done the sessions in a group since there are only a few of them. It’s easier to manage that way. But this year I’ll try working with each tester one on one. And this year I’m having them select a skill they think is something they need to learn more of instead of me just providing some agenda in the group meetings. Each tester will have a weekly one-hour one-on-one schedule with me, we’ll review what the tester understands about the topic of their choosing, we’ll study together, and then I’ll provide challenges for them to go through until the next one-on-one. It’s an engaging setup I haven’t done before, something that’s likely to eat more of my time and attention but something that warrants testing since the organization recently changed work schedules to working remotely about half of the time.

Testing Goals for 2018

I think that I have more or less accomplished my testing goals for this year. As expected there weren’t many changes at work; workload remained pretty much the same and I had enough free time to try the tools that I thought were interesting. I read most of the books on my reading list. I was able to get the testing team curious on API testing. I re-wrote the existing UI test suite to API-based tests because they’re faster, more readable, and easier to extend and maintain that way. I learned new skills – web application pentesting basics and a nifty test-driven software development workflow – that will be put to the test in the coming years.

What about 2018?

Hmm. Besides continued knowledge-sharing sessions and the practice of test-driven software development I don’t really have that many goals next year in terms of testing and development of software. I’m sure I’ll continue to take interesting online courses and be updated on what’s happening in the testing community but other than that I don’t know.

What I do know and what I believe I want to focus on more next year is taking better care of myself, outside of work. I’d like to get better at both preparing good food and exercising. I’d like to put my drawing skills to work once again. I’d like to take better care of friends and family. The skills I want to get better at now are not those that I can practice in front of a computer but on the field, both when alone and with other people.

I’ll have to try changing some of my existing ineffective habits and stories. It’s going to be a difficult 2018.

Extending The Avenues Of Performing Testing

Last Wednesday afternoon I anxiously asked my boss for permission to make changes on our application code repository. I said I wanted to try fixing some of the reported bugs listed on our tracking system, if there are no other resources available to pass them to. I made a case about myself not posing any problems because of the code review process built into our repository management tool, that there’s no reason for me to merge any changes without getting feedback from a senior developer first.

He smiled at me and gleefully said “Go ahead. I’m not going to stop you.“, to which I beamed and heartily replied “Thanks, boss!”

This is a turning point in my software testing career, to be able to work on the application code directly as needed. It is actually one of my biggest frustrations – to not be able to find out for myself where the bug lives in the code and fix them if necessary. It’s always a pain to be able to do nothing but wait for a fix, and for a fix to be dependent on the resources available. In my head I think that I’m available and maybe I can do something, but I don’t explicitly have access to the application itself and the code that runs it so I can’t do anything until I have the rights to do so. That’s how it always been. Software testers are often not expected to fiddle with code, at least in my experience, especially in the past where automation was not yet known to be useful as a testing tool. Now that I have the skills and the permission to work on the application repository, I feel that my reach for making an impact on application quality has now expanded remarkably well.

Now bug-fixing is not software testing work in the traditional sense. But I figured there’s no harm in trying to fix bugs and learning the nitty-gritty details of how our legacy applications actually run deep in the code. I believe that learning technical stuff helps me communicate better with programmers. It helps me test applications in a more efficient manner too. Of course I have to consistently remind myself that I am a software-tester-first-programmer-second guy and have to be careful not to fill my days playing with code and forgetting to explore our applications themselves. That said, there are ideas I really want to experiment within our software development process, towards the goal of improving code quality and feedback, and I can only tinker with those ideas inside the application repository itself. Dockerized testing environments, code linting, and unit tests are three things I want to start building for our team, ideas that I consider to be very helpful in writing better code but has not been given enough priority through the years.

I think I’m still testing software, just extending the knowledge and practice of the various ways I perform testing.

Lessons from Lucius Seneca’s “On The Shortness Of Life”

One interesting topic I’ve come across this year in a few podcasts I listen to is Stoicism. William Irvine introduced the school of thought in an episode of the Art of Manliness podcast and Ryan Holiday wrote a practical guide about it for entrepreneurs on The Tim Ferriss Show. It has practical applications in daily life, and because of that I’d like to eventually learn more about what to practice and its how’s and why’s. For now though, I thought that reading up on Seneca’s essay ‘On the Shortness of Life‘ would be a good starting point.

Here are some notes from the essay:

• It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it’s been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things, if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it’s spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses and we realize that the life which we didn’t notice passing has passed away. So it is: the life we are given isn’t short but we make it so; we’re not ill provided but we are wasteful of life.
• Look at those whose prosperity draws crowds: they are choked by their own goods. How many have found their wealth a burden! How many are drained of their blood by their eloquence and their daily preoccupation with showing off their abilities! How many are sickly pale from their incessant pleasures! How many are left with no freedom from the multitude of their besieging clients!
• What foolish obliviousness to our mortality to put off wise plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to want to begin life from a point that few have reached!
• The person who devotes every second of his time to his own needs and who organizes each day as if it were a complete life neither longs for nor is afraid of the next day. For what new kind of pleasure is there that any hour can now bring? Everything has been experienced, everything enjoyed to the full. For the rest, fortune may make arrangements as it wishes; his life has already reached safety. Addition can be made to this life, but nothing taken away from it – and addition made in the way that a man who is already satisfied and full takes a portion of food which he doesn’t crave and yet has room for.
• I am always astonished when I see people requesting the time of others and receiving a most accommodating response from those they approach. Both sides focus on the object of the request, and neither on time itself; it is requested as if it were nothing, granted as if it were nothing. People trifle with the most precious commodity of all; and it escapes their notice because it’s an immaterial thing that doesn’t appear to the eyes, and for that reason it’s valued very cheaply – or rather, it has practically no value at all.
• The greatest waste of life lies in postponement: it robs us of each day in turn, and snatches away the present by promising the future. The greatest impediment to living is expectancy, which relies in tomorrow and wastes today. You map out what is in fortune’s hand but let slip what’s in your own hand. What are you aiming at? What’s your goal? All that’s to come lies in uncertainty: live right now.
• There is a common saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents we were allotted, and that they were given to us by chance; yet we can be born to whomever we wish. There are households of the most distinguished intellects: choose the one into which you’d like to be adopted, and you’ll inherit not just the name but also the actual property, which is not to be hoarded in a miserly or mean spirit: the more people you share it with, the greater it will become.
• Honors, monuments, all that ostentatious ambition has ordered by decree or erected in stone, are soon destroyed: there’s nothing that the long lapse of time doesn’t demolish and transform. But it cannot harm the works consecrated by wisdom: no age will efface them, no age reduce them at all. The next age and each one after that will only enhance the respect in which they are held, since envy focuses on what is close at hand, but we more freely admire things from a distance.
• It is nevertheless better – believe me – to know the balance sheet of one’s own life than that of the public grain supply.
• In this mode of life much that is worth studying awaits you: the love and practice of the virtues, forgetfulness of the passions, knowledge of how to live and to die, and deep repose.