Love My Work

In a recent episode of the Vernon Richard show, testing's dynamic duo were inspired by Valentine's Day to talk about their love for our craft. On the topic of tools, Richard sings the praises of Selenium, but Vernon takes a different tack, instead talking about tool creation ... and me!

I worked at the same company as Vern for a couple of years and we'd find time to pair on something most weeks even though our responsibilities didn't overlap at all. Sometimes he'd bring a problem, sometimes it'd be show-and-tell about what we were working on, occasionally it was about people and process, but what really lit him up was when we looked at code together, particularly if we built something.

I was out walking and listening to podcasts when the episode popped up in my feed. Honestly, it was a strange feeling to hear myself being talked about, even though Vern gave me a heads-up that he'd done it just after it was recorded. What he said is nothing that he hasn't said to me privately (and yes, he really does call me Mr Wizard) yet hearing what I do called out as something special in public, despite knowing that many people don't work the same way, is still weird.

I thought, modestly of course, it might be interesting to note down what Vern said and provide some links so I took the YouTube transcript and tried to edit it into something that reads reasonably well while preserving Vern's unique voice:

What I love is people's ability to create their own tools, to use their technical understanding of the application that they're trying to interact with. My favorite example of this is my buddy James Thomas. He just makes tools. He's got such a beautiful understanding of technology.

I always call him Mr Wizard but he always says "Vern, I probably know a very tiny percentage of a lot of tools" but that actually gives him gives him great power and great flexibility.

He can create tools out of bash, he can create tools using python, he's a grep ninja, ... When we worked together I was fortunate enough I would I would try and spend some time with him once a week and we would just go through some technical stuff and it invariably that meant he was showing me how he was doing stuff.

Sometimes it meant I would like to be able to do something and I know there's a way to do it technically but I need help and so he would spend some time trying to, you know, poke me along to try and figure something out in bash.

That is what that is what I absolutely love. If I can become that guy ...

I'm in a people leadership role right now so I don't know how much opportunity there will be for me to get my hands dirty in the day job but I still have this dream in the back of my head that I can basically become like James or like my other friend Lisi [Hocke].

I'm not even talking about being someone like Rich [Bradshaw] or someone like Angie Jones, or Mark Winteringham, or Amber Race, or all these other ridiculous humans who are up one with the machine.

I just want to be able to just be comfortable in bash and be able to cobble together a script and create these tools that can go and grab information from, here grab it from there, pipe it into a thing, diff the things, and spit out the results you know.

Just 👌

In the show notes, there are links to some examples of the kinds of things Vern was talking about:

I'll add a few more below and note that I have a broad view of what automation is and know from experience that even a tiny amount can return huge value. A key thing to keep in mind is that many tasks (or parts of those tasks) have the potential to be automated, to whatever level makes sense at the time.

To give a super-trivial example: I don't know many times I have watched someone scrolling back and forth in a file looking for a string when they could hit Ctrl-F and find one in a second, or call grep and find all the hits in even less time, or write a bash script and call it to find all the hits, sort them, count duplicates, format the results and write a CSV file, or ...

Its flattering that Vern called out my work. Naturally, I like some parts of what I do better than others but I can say unequivocally that building just enough tooling at the right cost to solve a problem or answer a question is something I love.
Image: https://flic.kr/p/5b8aHn

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