Time for the list of things I found interesting/amusing this month.
Link soup
Let’s start with the good news: OpenAPI 3.1.0 RC is out!. Webhooks and reconciliation with JSON Schema are the highlights of the version. I hope tooling support won’t lag this time.
I really liked the article by Daniel Jarjoura on communications. For example, I didn’t know that crowd brainstorming is proved to be less effective.
Cool little apps I was recommended:
- For drawing: Excalidraw
- For text expansion: Espanso
- For knowledge management: Obsidian (more about it in the next article)
Positioning change
And, finally, the regular column “I kinda don’t like testers.” This month I tracked all testers-centric communities and articles to determine how useful these sources of information are for me. The result was as expected: noise to signal ratio was appalling. I’m tired of:
- Rehashing of the same ideas by the same authors for years.
- Questions that will never pass Stack Overflow filter.
- “Should testers learn to code?” debate specifically.
- Being overly dramatic about the slightest differences in opinion. The schools of testing, yadda-yadda.
- Over-glorifying the tester’s role and knowledge (common in certain groups).
- Jokes and memes about us (testers) vs. them (devs) (typical amongst juniors and junior oriented resources).
Thus, I made some decision:
1. I left RST and MoT (and its abolished sister group) slack communities. Stayed only in the ABT, because it’s smaller and more enjoyable.
2. Won’t hunt for any more testers-centric resources. Mind you, testers-centric ≠ testing-centric. Whatever I had in RSS + ABT podcast is more than enough.
3. Won’t save articles into reading queue “just in case”, if it’s obvious from the title and the first paragraph that the author is repeating themselves.
4. Change “About me” page to be less role specific. I wrote it a long time ago.
5. Do I contribute to the same noise? Perhaps. Can’t promise, but I’ll try not to. Obviously, these Hmms aren’t really original content, but written reflection is a great way to process information, sorry!
P.S. the saddest YouTube’s recommendation
YouTube recommended me to rewatch the opening sequence to the “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”. The movie is forgettable, but this small part is a masterful tearjerker, especially now.