Hiccupps

It's 14 years since I first posted on Hiccupps and one since I wrote about about  using trees for my mental health . Both practices are ongoing. Trees first: every Saturday I find a space with trees and spend a few minutes of silence with them. I breathe slowly and deeply and I look up through the branches to the sky, visualising a tangled journey into the blue, imagining it is my path to a better place.  The picture at the top is from the park around Schloss Lübbenau because last weekend I was in Germany but it can be any tree, anywhere. I have done it with a single tree on a quiet street corner. Blogging next: I am often asked why I blog. Sadly, I don't have a straightforward answer. On one level I just like to write. Before I wrote this blog I wrote a music fanzine for ten years. I genuinely can't remember when I didn't write something . It feels intrinsic, part of me.  My anniversary posts  talk about different extrinsic motivations at different times: I had exp...

  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 some thing ) 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 re...

  When I opened Blogger the other morning I saw that the Hiccupps all-time page view counter had ticked up to exactly 500000. My initial feeling was pleasure. Ooh! A milestone! Half a million views! Get me ! But that was fleeting.  As with many metrics, today's value is almost the least engaging aspect. What's more interesting is what the number represents, what it is desired that it should represent, and how closely those two concepts align on axes that matter. Also interesting: who wanted this metric (and there may be multiple interested parties) and whether they still want it, what assumptions are being made about it, what values (or milestones) matter, what it is being plugged into, and what decisions are made using it. That's not all, of course, because one sample is just one sample. More interesting is where it sits in context to others, if and how it is trending, and whether it correlates with relevant related metrics over the same period. I could go on. I don't ...

That's my 599 blog posts from October 2011 to December 2022.   Well, it's one view of them, a view that demonstrates that I show up and I ship. For me, these are useful, satisfying, and creative acts.   I like Seth Godin on creativity. In an interview with Thought Economics he says: What it means to be creative is pretty simple. It’s to do something human, something generous, something that might not work. Tick, tick, tick ... I hope.    Godin is also interesting on achieving success. I don't know whether I'd say Hiccupps is successful in any objective sense. Godin's take is that you have to show up first: Commitment to the process, the practice and the method comes before the success. So, success? I wrote a music fanzine when I was younger. More than once it was described as the zine-writer's zine. Looking for a reference to that, I found this :  "... zines that stood out, such as Robots and Electronic Br...

Time for another anniversary reflection . My goal back in October 2011 was to write once a week for year, with a couple of weeks off for holidays. Two years and 100 posts in I paused to consider how things were going and since then I've done the same every 50 posts or calendar year. Today is post number 550. I am regularly asked how I manage this. It helps that I like writing and find it valuable to get my ideas straight, record experiences, and document my thinking and learning but mostly, I think, it's because I've made it my habit. Seth Godin calls it showing up : When we commit to a practice, we don’t have to wonder if we’re in the mood, if it’s the right moment, if we have a headache or momentum or the muse by our side. We already made those decisions. ... Outcomes are important ... But the outcome isn’t the practice, the practice leads us to the outcome. Find work worth doing, and begin there. When I think an ...

About once a week, on average, for just under ten years I have published a blog post. 500 posts in total. Wow. The nucleus of the content has always been software testing but what falls into its orbit has varied as my thinking, my needs, and my activities have changed over time. With one eye always on testing, and the other on my context, I've covered areas such as software development, management, recruitment, writing, creativity, visualisation, tech support, meetups, workshops, conferences, training, exploration, Jerry Weinberg, semantics, science, statistics, public speaking, sketchnoting and, erm, fixing my toilet . I was wondering how to commemorate this anniversary when I recalled that in another lifetime I wrote a music zine which also reached the ten-year mark. Re-reading the retrospective piece I penned for that I found this line that encapsulated my triple aims of honesty, economy, and quality: Be true to myself. Say what the music is. Don...

When I started Hiccupps I challenged myself to do 50 posts in the first year. If I could manage one piece a week, I reckoned, I'd have a decent idea whether I really wanted to write and whether the effort I was putting in was worth it.  At the end of that initial 12 months I found that I really did want to write and, that as far as I was concerned, the effort was worth it. In the almost nine years since then I've maintained an annual average of around 50 posts and as I've reached the half-century or October I've taken a moment to reflect on how things are going. This post will be the 456th — with something like the 400th awful pun of a title — and so now seems like a good time as any to look back down the track again. Blog is a contraction of weblog and it occurs to me now, in a way that I'm not sure it has before, that Hiccupps genuinely is a log of stuff I've been pondering or doing or reading or viewing. The posts feel...

I started writing Hiccupps just about eight years ago so, following tradition, here's an anniversary selection of pieces that I am particularly pleased with from this year: The Value of Testing is ... Don't be a Prick The Value in Values Amazingly, at 424 posts, I've managed to average one a week over the long haul and I don't think there's been a month in that time where I haven't published at least once. I spent a little time reflecting on that, wondering what my motivations are these days. I think they include: a desire to be alert to my thoughts and feelings, and to shine a light onto what they are, and where they have come from, and how they compare to other people's and my own at other times. a desire to document my learning as I branch into new areas such as management, or sketchnotes, or idea generation. a desire to record the ideas of others and the thoughts they've sparked in me. I use writing, only some of it on this public bl...

Just past the seven-year anniversary of Hiccupps, and taking stock once more, I find that I averaged around a post a week over the last 12 months. 50 posts a year  was my target when I started the blog back in 2011 and initially it was motivational: I'd find out if blogging could suit me, and me it, only by blogging, and I was prepared to put aside time to gather that data for a year. You can judge whether I suit blogging (for your needs, at this time, naturally) but my judgement (for myself, over the years) is that writing this blog suits me. I've retained the loose goal of weekly postings not because there's anything intrinsically positive about that volume of material, nor because it guarantees anything about the content, but because it continues to stimulate me to find a time box to write in and writing regularly brings me better writing, deeper thinking, and happiness. In these annual retrospective posts I've generally plucked out a few pieces that brought...

Hiccupps just turned six years old. Happy birthday to us. And thank you for reading; I hope you're getting something out of it still. Unwittingly I've stumbled into a tradition of reflecting on the previous 12 months and picking out a few posts that I liked above the others for some reason. Here's this year's selection: What We Found Not Looking for Bugs : a headrush conversation with Anders Dinsen on the nature and timing of testing  The Dots : a headrush conversation with myself on the connections between the connected things  Fix Up, Look Sharp : a headrush reading experience from Ron Jeffries' Extreme Programming Adventures in C#  Quality != Quality : a headrush of being picked up by Hacker News, my page views going nuts, and developers debating quality  A (Definition of) Testing Story : a headrush last-minute conference proposal accepted at UKSTAR 2018  And in the meantime my mission to keep my testing mind limber with rule-of-three punning ...

The first post on Hiccupps was published five years ago this week. It's called Sign Language  and, reading it back now, although I might not write it the same way today, I'm not especially unhappy with it. The closing sentence still feels like a useful heuristic, even if I didn't present it that way at the time: Your audience is not just the target audience, it's anyone who sees what it is you've done and forms an opinion of you because of it. I've looked back over the blog on most of its anniversaries, and each time found different value: I Done the Ton : After two years I compared my progress to my initial goals and reflected on how I'd become a tester and test manager  It's the Thought That Counts : After three years I began to realise that the act of blogging was an end in itself, not just a means to an end  My Two Cents : After four years, the value of time series data about myself and the evolution (or lack of evolution) of my thoughts an...

This is the 200th post on Hiccupps. At a milestone like this it's common to pause and reflect, and I've done so a couple of times to date. If you are of an historical bent you might try the lengthy hundredth , or, if introspective is your thing then number 150 is perhaps more up your street. But this one, this double centenary, this one is short and sweet and about ideas. My blog, I see more and more, is a repository of ideas I've had, and sometimes about aspects of the ideas, meta ideas such as the paths to those ideas , connections between ideas  and the way that ideas breed ideas . I try hard not to knowingly regurgitate other people's ideas unless I am commenting on them, or questioning them, or testing my own against them. Which doesn't mean that I don't value them. Quite the opposite in fact: I am a fan of ideas, for and by us all; not least because with no ideas there are no good ideas . Image: Old Book Illustrations

A year ago, I wrote about reaching the milestone of 100 blog posts . Part of my initial challenge to myself had been to write regularly: Trying to post around once a week has been a useful discipline. If nothing else it's motivational. I've managed to carve out time even when life and work have been hectic ... Twelve months on and I was surprised to see that I'd gone past the 150 without noticing. Some of my motivation back when I started came from a bit of self-analysis: I started to think more deeply about what I was doing and how I was doing it and tried to tease out where my actions, intuitions, ideas and mistakes were coming from.  Now, having introspected  some more I realise that one of the things I'm getting out of blogging these days is the act itself. Phil Kay talked about "keeping loose" in the interview I quoted  recently and Rick Rubin , describing Eminem , said much the same thing  in another: he is always writing ... he knows 99% of ...

This is the 100th post on Hiccupps. I started the blog just under two years ago with the self-challenge of writing 50 posts in a year and a manifesto of sorts: to blog primarily about testing and related areas to explore and document my thinking to try to offer something different from other blogs to be truthful to write well to be myself ... ... but not come across as (too much of) a pretentious or pompous  pillock to protect the confidentiality of my company, customers and colleagues, where mentioned to have the freedom to write anything I want to, within the other constraints I was inspired most directly by Abakas  and QA Hates You which were both being updated frequently, spoke with a distinctive voice and were provocative in their own separate ways. Catherine Powell would frequently cover topics away from testing, with an eye to making a point relevant to it and always clearly from a practitioner's perspective. Brian Noggle's persona was - and is - mo...