This post is, belatedly, inspired by the Ministry of Testing blog idea: The Struggle with Learning to Code. I have a Computer Science degree, and have been programming for a while. (I started doing it as a hobby, and then studied it, and then got paid to do it.) I struggle with learning to code, … Continue reading The Struggle with Learning to Code
Looking for copyright music in live streams
My friend Ted has recently started exercising in earnest, to get fighting fit for when he can go back into schools, museums etc. to blow children's minds about creative writing. While he exercises, he plays music from CDs to motivate him and he live streams it to Facebook for accountability. Sometimes the live stream is … Continue reading Looking for copyright music in live streams
The compounding value of information
Information is one of those things where sometimes the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That is, you get extra value from combining bits of information, on top of the value from the separate bits of information on their own. I’ll illustrate this with an example to do with spies, but then … Continue reading The compounding value of information
Sankey diagrams to explain Coronavirus and Covid19
There’s a kind of diagram, called a Sankey diagram, that can be used to show relationships between things. I will briefly introduce it, and then use one to illustrate Coronavirus and Covid19 in the UK. It will simplify things, but I hope will still help you get a better understanding of how the various numbers … Continue reading Sankey diagrams to explain Coronavirus and Covid19
User experience (UX) and data quality
Someone I know was moaning recently about a lot of tedious electronic form filling they had to do for work. It was something that happened once a year, but it was much more lengthy and tedious this year than before. It struck me that this was a sharply focused example of when user experience (UX) … Continue reading User experience (UX) and data quality
Creating unit tests from scratch
As well as refactoring existing unit tests, I’ve also recently created some tests from scratch. I realised that, while I have gone on at length about testing on this blog, including the ways in which I think tests can be well- or poorly-written, I haven’t talked about the process of writing them. In case it’s … Continue reading Creating unit tests from scratch
Panning for meaning in unit tests
I recently made a code change, and also made the corresponding changes to the unit tests. Once that was sorted and tided away in a commit, I spent another commit refactoring the unit tests. As I was refactoring, I realised that the motivation behind the refactoring, i.e. what was influencing its direction, was a desire … Continue reading Panning for meaning in unit tests
Analysing flooding rivers
I live in a place that has a river flowing through it. Like in many places in the UK, we have had floods this week, which has been stressful for people whose homes and businesses have been affected. Fortunately, we were OK and no-one here was affected too badly. As a complement to the stress … Continue reading Analysing flooding rivers
What motivates your technical writing?
I recently received a letter from my bank that was meant to explain something, but it didn’t. This reminded me of a fruitful conversation I had with someone on the Ministry of Testing slack community, about what motivations people might have for writing. In this post I’ll try to dig into that a bit, in … Continue reading What motivates your technical writing?
Customers, suppliers and fences
In my previous post, I contrasted two different terms for thinking about how people interact with your organisation – Customer Experience (CX) and User Experience (UX). Rebecca Brown (a CX expert I mentioned in the post) kindly explained her view of CX to me, which got me thinking of some quality and process things that … Continue reading Customers, suppliers and fences
