Typically, people say that testing is like a pyramid. A wide base of unit tests and very few end-to-end tests. I believe we’ve come to a point where a crab strategy is a better approach.

I am a huge proponent of a couple of specific ideas. One is that you should always try to understand what problems a specific tool is trying to solve… And another is that you need to understand exactly what problems you are trying to solve in your own application right now, and pick the tools that solve your problem best.

With constant change being our new normal these days, I cannot attest enough to the importance of implementing the habit of self-care. The biggest reason, aside from the sheer benefit of taking care of yourself, is the crucial by-product of margin that we gain. However, the challenge is that we often know what’s important for our health, yet we fail to incorporate these “knowns” into our daily lives.

In this post I cover what self-care is and the ways to establish habits that can help you create more margin in your life.

It has become even more clear to me during the era of COVID-19 that poor communication is the reason systems and relationships fail. Every time I’ve failed to get what myself, my team, or a community wanted out of an engineering team was because I neglected to communicate why and how it would be impactful to them in a digestible way.

In this post, I share a few lessons learned as a non-technical launching hardware and software products over the last decade. We’ll explore tactics and skills teams can use to communicate more effectively.

In which I pick on Jamstack a bit to make a larger point that we still haven’t found that Silver Bullet and we’re not going to so let’s put our thinking caps on, make sound choices, and pick the right tools for each situation.

To celebrate our 100th episode of Practical AI, we’re giving away 3 FREE AI hardware bundles! Enter for your chance to win an NVIDIA Jetson Nano, Intel’s Neural Compute Stick, and Google’s Coral Dev Board (plus swag).

It’s easy to forget that there’s a human on the other side of that <textarea>. So we tend not to give people the benefit of the doubt on the internet. This post is a gentle reminder of that fact and how active awareness of it would go a long way toward making it a more enjoyable place for all of us.

If you’re a subscriber of Brain Science, then you’re going to love my upcoming talk at Heartifacts in August. The conference is online and virtual (of course) which means our entire global audience can attend. Registration is $75 with swag or $50 swag-free. We’re giving away three (3) free passes, so keep reading to learn more.

To celebrate our friend Zeno Rocha’s first book (and our new episode with Zeno discussing all the details) we’re giving away 3 FREE bundles of Dracula PRO && 14 Habits of Highly Productive Developers 🙌

GitHub Sponsors is a step forward, but is far from a panacea. I propose “sponsorship pools”, an alternative approach to OSS sustainability.

We had an excellent interview with Beth Dakin and Ronak Shah from the Safari team about what’s new and interesting for developers in Safari 14. There were so many good moments that I figured a round-up post was warranted. ICYMI (or don’t have time for the full convo), here’s the highlights from my POV.

I am now making more money than I’ve ever made while developing open-source software for a community that I adore. Pinch me, I’m dreaming.

Was it luck? there’s certainly been a lot of that.

Was it fate? Let’s leave religion out of this mmkay?…

Was it that the software I built was so incredibly compelling that it forced 535 people to give me at least $14/mo. to keep working on it? …I wish.

It’s more than that though. There were some key things I did along the way to get here. Let me tell you all about them.

Turns out everyone’s favorite macOS package manager has an official cask for managing fonts. Who knew?!

Behind the scenes we heard about Sid’s idea of “family and friends first,” so we asked him to share the idea with our audience and how it’s being embraced at GitLab. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode of Founders Talk with Sid. I’m sure we’ll touch on this idea and more._

Even at GitLab, we’ve seen increased productivity as the number of merge requests for both March and April exceeded February’s numbers. But as company leader, I don’t see this as something to tout. This new normal is anything but normal, and we shouldn’t treat it as such. Even though GitLab has always been remote and experienced less of a transition than most other companies, our team members are not immune to the stressors of quarantine. Overworking or maintaining the status quo during a crisis is not a badge of honor. In fact, I would be prouder if more employees were taking time off to reset and refresh or spend time adjusting to this “new normal” with their families.

Wondering why your Phoenix application is recompiling dozens or hundreds of files every time you make a small change? Cross-module compilation dependencies are often to blame.