Archives
150 posts total. See Filtering and Navigation for tips on how to find the bits in which you're interested.
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I've completed the full script for my first post-Apple presentation on testing, culture change, and leadership.
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A conversation with Utsav Shah about automated testing adoption, culture change, and leadership.
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We're more alike than different—but it can be easier to convince the rest of the world of that than our own teammates.
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I learned to focus, simplify, and know my own value.
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I've had a great year at Apple so far, and now I'm looking for people to join my Test Paratroopers internal consulting team.
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In a bizarre twist of fate, after a great run at Cvent, I've taken the unexpected opportunity to join Apple.
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A lot of my work at Cvent is reminiscent of my past, but my colleagues and I are discovering how to do it faster and better than we did at Google.
- 21 posts
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It's not that I haven't had enough to say these past few months, but rather that I've had too much—including a significant career announcement.
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I've released go-script-bash v1.7.0, which contains powerful new test helpers and file system modules, as well as project management improvements.
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I attended my first beCamp in Charlottesville, delivered a few talks, and generally had a wonderful time—with one especially hilarious glitch
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I've released go-script-bash v1.6.0, a small release featuring its first user-contributed feature!
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At this point, I don't think I'm making an unreasonable request for a very specific birthday gift that would delight us all.
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Some wheels were meant for reinventing—if sometimes only because we need to teach ourselves how they work!
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Despite the silence, I've had a few things going on since returning from Europe—and there's still so much to do!
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The first Schibsted Testing Fixit on June 22, 2017 was a success! And it inspired some people in ways I couldn't have imagined.
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For most of this time, I've been working in Barcelona with my first paying client, started a new project, wrote a new talk, and have been touring across Europe.
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I've released go-script-bash v1.5.0, a relatively small release introducing the lib/prompt and lib/existence modules.
- 6 posts
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Review comments on The Rainbow of Death have inspired a genuine research topic, but I need some help to implement it.
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Brothers John and Justin Hunter of Hexawise interviewed me for their "Testing Smarter with..." series, just posted to the Hexawise blog.
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I've released go-script-bash v1.4.0, another large update that includes massive test performance improvements, amongst other significant new features
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My presentation of "The Rainbow of Death" at DevOpsDays Baltimore 2017 went really, really well; the slides and full narrative are available here!
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The DevOpsDays Baltimore live stream details are posted, so tune in at 9:15am on March 8 to catch The Rainbow of Death!
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"The Rainbow of Death" talk I'm giving at DevOpsDays Baltimore this Wednesday, March 8 at 9:15am ET is promising to be the best talk I've yet given.
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I'll be keynoting DevOpsDays Baltimore on March 8, I've made updates to my portfolio page, and I've some updates on go-script-bash v1.4.0 and more.
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This blog now features a Let's Encrypt certificate with HPKP, and I hope to share insights and tooling that may be of use to others.
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Staying busy as a coping mechanism has given way to frustration and outrage that I'm struggling to put to good use.
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I've delivered an updated version of my "documentation and training" talk at Royall & Company at the invitation of Isaac Truett
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I've just released go-script-bash v1.3.0, which is a massive update, especially for logging and automated testing features
- 20 posts
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I've just released go-script-bash v1.1.0, which adds some major new features, two new builtin commands, and multiple bug fixes and internal improvements.
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I was forcefully reminded of the wages of complacency last night, in a rather intense, personal fashion. I'm ready to act.
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Some background on the .about.yml project metadata format prompted by an unexpected inquiry from the TODO Group.
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The video of the Surge 2016 version of "The Convergence of Wills", probably my favorite iteration of the talk so far, is now available. Plus a bonus go-script-bash lightning talk!
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I believe Donald Trump embodies the worst of everything that is wrong about the United States of America, about men, and about humanity in general. We must not elect him.
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Just posted a "Hello, World!" example for the new
ReactionMessagetype I added to thehubot-slacknpm.
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James Comey's George Washington Leadership Lecture was one of the most outstanding speeches I've ever heard in my life.
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Gene Kim posted about the appearance of "The Birth of Automated Testing at Google in 2005" in the upcoming DevOps Handbook.
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I'll be delivering "The Convergence of Wills" one more time at Surge 2016 this Friday at 11am.
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I've been obsessed with writing a framework for ./go scripts in Bash, and have just released v1.0.0.
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One more iteration on the Google Testing Grouplet story, this time tailored to Netflix's culture of "Freedom and Responsibility".
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I delivered a talk on the importance of documentation and training to the culture change mission during the Chadevs weekly lunch Meetup.
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I delivered a talk Monday, am halfway through the automated testing workshops, and will be live streaming another talk Thursday at noon.
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Links to the video and slides of my "The Convergence of Wills (abridged)" talk, as well as an extra surprise.
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A last minute announcement of my DevOpsDays DC talk and upcoming unit testing workshop in Chattanooga.
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Here are the slides to my Beyond20'16 presentation, "The Convergence of Wills".
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I've resigned from 18F, am taking some time off, and am speaking at the Beyond20'16 conference next week.
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I've written a Slack bot in Node.js that files GitHub issues, and a unit testing tutorial in Node.js based on the bot.
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The third and final post of my "Turning learning up to eleven" trilogy, focusing on knowledge sharing, is now on the 18F blog.
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The second post of my "Turning learning up to eleven" trilogy, focusing on transparent internal operations, is now on the 18F blog.
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The first post of my "Turning learning up to eleven" trilogy is now on the 18F blog.
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Sometimes, when inspiration strikes, it isn't pretty; in fact, it can be downright painful and horrid. Please don't read this post.
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My work to improve knowledge sharing at 18F is paying off, and I aim to make thieving bastards of us all.
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The video for my talk at the 2015 DevOps Enterprise conference, in which I talk about Google and 18F, is now available on YouTube
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I seemed to pop up all over the place this week: at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; in online government press; and at Christopher Newport University.
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My latest 18F blog post about our ever-evolving onboarding process, "Building a better welcome wagon" is now posted.
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After a bit of hunting and poking around, I got my Plan 9 virtual machine on the net, installed the Go programming language, and made good on a promise.
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I've finally gotten Plan 9 and its rio windowing system running successfully under VMware Fusion 7.1.1 on OS X 10.10.3 and feel like shouting about it.
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I've written a new 18F blog post describing my experience using Bitly's oauth2_proxy for the 18F Hub and contributing code changes back to it.
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Billy Mitchell from FedScoop covered 18F Guides in a brief article late yesterday, providing a little more context around the vision.
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My post announcing 18F Guides has been published on the 18F blog, describing our goals and ambitions for this collection of documents.
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I delivered a talk to the Arlington Ruby Meetup describing my work on the Jekyll-based 18F Hub and 18F Pages web sites.
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I posted an announcement of 18F Pages, our government-approved reimplementation of GitHub Pages.
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A number of initiatives that I've started within 18F have been taking off, with more to come.
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The White House just launched its U.S. Digital Service recruiting website, in which I play a small but proud role.
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I've been awarded a January 2015 "Flushy" award for being the first Xoogler (ex-Googler) to write Google Testing on the Toilet episodes.
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I finally reveal the 18F Hub, the reason I've been in Fixit Mode since joining 18F two months ago.
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I've posted another 18F blog entry introducing the 18F-flavored version of snippets to the world.
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My first-ever blog post for 18F is now live, announcing my "Large Scale Development Culture Change" webinar.
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The webinar video from my December 2, 2014 delivery of "Large Scale Development Culture Change" at the GSA via DigitalGov
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Quick updates on my progress as part of 18F, and "Large Scale Culture Change: Google and the US Government" at the GSA on Dec 2
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I'm moving to Washington, D.C. to join the 18F team, to help change how development is done throughout the Federal government.
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I've produced a report on the early, promising results of my OpenSSL makefile refactoring experiment, in which I was successful using GNU make.
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I paid a visit to Washington, D.C. this past week, gave a tech talk on unit testing and culture change, and was amazed at the positive energy there.
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My original "goto fail" article has been published online and in print by the Communications of the ACM, the flagship journal of the ACM.
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I'm experimenting with refactoring OpenSSL's existing recursive Make structure into a top-Makefile-with-includes structure.
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I've dropped out of Berklee a second time, both to pace myself and pursue programming again for a little while.
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To launch the effort to add unit/automated tests to OpenSSL, I've created OpenSSL wiki pages and created the openssl-testing Google Group
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While writing the tests for the "goto fail" and Heartbleed bugs, I stumbled upon an xUnit-like pattern for writing tests without a framework.
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The OpenSSL team has accepted my offer to help improve its unit/automated testing, and now I'm recruiting people to help in the effort.
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Thanks to Ben Laurie, my unit/regression test for the Heartbleed bug has been commited to the central OpenSSL source repository.
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My original "goto fail" article has been published online by ACM Queue.
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Martin Fowler invited me to contribute an article to his website making a case for unit testing in the wake of "goto fail" and Heartbleed.
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The Google Testing on the Toilet team has published my episode about the Heartbleed bug, and other fronts are showing signs of progress
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A letter to cybersecurity expert Dan Geer regarding the role of unit testing in helping to avoid errors in security-critical software
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The Google Testing on the Toilet team has published my episode about the Apple SSL bug, and I explain why this is for the greater social good.
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A Testing on the Toilet-inspired article about the Heartbleed bug and how it could have been prevented
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I've written a complete proof-of-concept unit and regression test for the Heartbleed bug, and am pretty happy with it
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I wrote a rough skeleton of a proof-of-concept unit test for the Heartbleed bug that I hope to polish and complete over the weekend
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The Heartbleed bug has me seeing red just as much as Apple's SSL bug did, because it's another serious bug that could've been caught by a test
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Turns out I couldn't let the Apple SSL bug go quite yet, as I've submitted an article to Communications of the ACM for consideration
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Hopefully the Apple SSL bug is out of my system, having given an AutoTest Boston lightning talk and written a Testing on the Toilet-esque article
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Wrote a new script to update the tags for the playingthechanges.com MP3 files before importing them into iTunes, and accepted a challenge from David Plass
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My programming skills still come into play at Berklee, as I wrote a Python script to download the MP3 files from the Playing the Changes website
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I've published a new article on AutoTest Central about the Testing Grouplet's Small, Medium, and Large test size schema, and more on the Apple bug.
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Apple's recent SSL security bug compelled me to write a blog post for AutoTest Central illustrating how unit testing could've helped prevent it
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I spoke at the first Automated Testing Boston Meetup event, and have just posted on the AutoTest Central blog in the hopes of being useful
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The recent Go 1.2 release contains genius test coverage features, but the announcement illustrating them contains an annoying flaw
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Another Rob Galanakis-inspired post, a reflection on the nature and value of teamwork in the context of my Testing Grouplet and Fixit experiences
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Rob Galanakis, in one brief blog post, points exactly to what made my past Google Testing Grouplet experiences so special and powerful
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A call for advice and other forms of help regarding my nascent musical career at Berklee
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A reflection on my experiences at Berklee to date, including the realization that music and language are isomorphic human activities
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After the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013, I consider my good fortune and the suffering of others, and reaffirm my dedication to music
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Extracting the album artwork for Jimi Hendrix's "People, Hell & Angels" from iTunes 11, using vim to change the binary ITC file format to JPEG
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There are many better uses of my time than getting sucked into writing demented Python scripts for Mac OS X. That doesn't seem to matter, always.
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It was five years ago today that the Build Tools team, Testing Technology, and Testing Grouplet taught the band to play with Blaze, Forge, and SrcFS
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Tuition is paid, new ID card is in-hand, and I'm all set to start classes at Berklee College of Music next week
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How to create a rechargeable 9V power supply for guitar effects pedals, based on advice from The Gear Page
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Tips on how this blog is organized and navigated so folks can tune into the signals they are interested in and filter out the rest
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Modifying the MXR Micro Amp for True Bypass switching, requiring tricky circuit board surgery due to its original surface-mount DPDT switch
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The United Nations International Telecommunication Union is meeting to consider sanctioning Internet taxes and regulations, and I aim to misbehave
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A few things I'm thankful for this year, especially in the wake of the 2012 United States election
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A thought experiment regarding potential criticisms of my blog, in light of a comment by Rob Galanakis on my Leaving Google post
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The reasons I decided to leave Google, why I decided to return to music and Berklee, and why I've written so much about Google in this blog
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The second Fixit I organized to promote widespread adoption of automated developer testing throughout Google development
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The first Fixit I organized to promote widespread adoption of automated developer testing throughout Google development
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Announcement of the licensing of all blog posts on Mike Bland's blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
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The specific tools the Testing Grouplet, Testing Tech, Build Tools and others developed to improve testing development and efficiency at Google
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Comprehensive notes on maintaining a personal computer backup strategy, based on my Mac OS X experience
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A personal reflection on the 2012 United States Presidential election, the current United States political and social climate, and Jimi Hendrix
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The collection of processes Google uses for ensuring software quality, including automated developer testing as promoted by the Testing Grouplet
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The basics of how automated tests should--and should not--be written, as promoted by the Testing Grouplet at Google
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In the middle of moving to Boston, I find an old email to friends sent at the beginning of my adventures with the Testing Grouplet at Google.
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I learn that I'm still a programmer after writing tools in Ruby and Go to help publish my blog, which I've also now published on Google Code.
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Fighting back against critics of automated developer testing in light of the Testing Grouplet et. al.'s impact on Google development
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The fundamental object-oriented programming issues which produced Google's testing challenges and the solutions promoted by the Testing Grouplet
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The high-level cultural challenges to the adoption of automated developer testing at Google which the Testing Grouplet worked to overcome
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Everything I've been saying and will say in this blog about the Testing Grouplet, Test Certified, and Fixits at Google, compressed
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A team of developers within Google dedicated to helping development teams participate in the Testing Grouplet's Test Certified program
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The homegrown continuous integration and test system that powered the Testing Grouplet's Test Certified program at Google before TAP
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The Great American Road Trip is long since over, I've semi-retired from the tech industry, and I've decided to return to Berklee College of Music.
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After driving through Montana and Wyoming during my Great American Road Trip, I better understand Dog Day Afternoon.
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Highlights of my Great American Road Trip from Memphis to Boise
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My pilgrimage to the birtplace of Rock 'N Roll during my Great American Road Trip
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Back home in Virginia for the second day of my Great American Road Trip
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My Great American Road Trip begins, as I take the PATH to Hoboken and drive to Harrisburg, PA, then cave in and announce the trip on Google+.
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The before-and-after picture of the Testing Grouplet et. al.'s impact on Google Engineering
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Publicly-facing details about Google to which I contributed in a significant way
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The Testing Grouplet's terminology for getting Google engineers to think about the different scopes of automated tests
- 6 posts
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The Testing Grouplet's weekly publication for spreading testing news and views throughout Google, in the most opportune of places
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The New York Times reports on a Waldorf elementary school in which children of Googlers are enrolled.
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The Testing Grouplet's program for promoting good automated developer testing practices throughout Google Engineering
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This is where to go if you're wondering what's on my mind that I haven't written about yet.
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T-shirts: The worst schwag ever. Trust me. Just Say No!
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Fixits, when engineers throughout Google focus on back-burner issues for a day--and, more importantly, Fixit schwag
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The grassroots volunteer team which made automated developer testing a core practice of Google engineering culture--and had fun doing it
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Google Engineering Grouplets, aka Intergroups, Intergrouplets: Volunteers using their 20% time to make Google Engineering better
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A good cause, despite the gag-inducing ego-tripping
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I give up. Resistance is futile. I signed up for Google+.
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Nobody "un-likes" the Bastille! Nobody "un-friends" the Bastille! Nobody "un-follows" the Bastille!
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Reflections on Apple's impact from a Linux-based programmer
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Impressions of the first Hacks and Hackers Meetup in NYC