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Lucky for Some?

 

This month marks 13 years of Hiccupps and this is the 660th post. 

It's traditional for me to mention in my anniversary posts that, when I started the blog, I tested my interest in blogging by challenging myself to write around a post a week for year. I usually then also say that I'm amazed I've kept that rate up in the intervening years.

This year is no exception, although I am particularly surprised because my personal life is getting increasingly difficult and I am finding less time and energy for blogging. A non-surface glance at the numbers reflects this: 40 weeks into 2024 and 24 posts.

If I cared about such things, I might worry that Blogger's unreliable numbers suggest that someone (or more likely something) is visiting more as I do less.

But I don't care. Instead, as I look at this graph my testing head wonders whether this possible inverse relationship would mean that I could get a very large number of views by really slowing down, or an infinite number of views by stopping altogether.

But I'm not planning on stopping. I still find value in writing here and I'll continue to do it for the foreseeable future. I'm still doing interesting things at work and outside and I still think that it's interesting to share what I can about them.

Next week, for example, I'm running a unit testing workshop for some of the developers in my team. I offered to do it at one of our retrospectives because I'd been hacking through some very impenetrable test code trying to understand (a) what it even did and (b) how much of the data space we care about it covered.

I had never written a unit test before I started this role three years ago, so I don't consider myself an expert, but I do have opinions on heuristics for writing them in order to optimise for value from effort, readability, and coverage visibility. 

When I started to prepare a Miro board I found that what I had was a manifesto rather a workshop. I shared my thoughts last week and one of the developers realised she also had a manifesto and added it to mine. I wouldn't say that they conflict, but hers is bringing a different perspective.

I love this stuff and I find value in reflecting on it and learning from it, and writing about it. If you made it to the end of this ramble, I hope you feel lucky that you'll be able to carry on reading it.

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