Last time out, I was responding to a coaching client, a tester who was working in an organization fixated on test cases. Here, I’ll call her Frieda. She had some more questions about how to respond to her managers.

What if they want another tester to do your tests if you are not available?

“‘Your tests’, or ‘your testing’?”, I asked.

From what I’ve heard, your tests. I don’t agree with this but trying to see it from their point of view, said Frieda.

I wonder what would happen if we asked them “What happens when you want another manager to do your managing if you are not available?” Or “What happens when you want another programmer to do programming if the programmer is not available?” It seems to me that the last thing they would suggest would be a set of management cases, or programming cases. So why the fixation on test cases?

The act of putting pen to paper was like putting a mental sticky note in my mind; if I write something down, it’s more likely to stick with me than if I type it into my phone. Beyond that, looking at my phone calendar has never been second nature, so during my calendar-less years, keeping up with events became more difficult. I knew about big things, work-related things, but I’d occasionally, unintentionally, miss smaller coffee meetings or phone calls. I tried a day planner for a while, but transferring it from bag to bag just felt like a bother. “Portable” is overrated.

Back in September 2018, before formal testing phase for Satellite 6.5 started, I was asked to join one of development teams as part of our "upstream first" initiative. I was second person in our group to do so. We didn't set up objectives or expected outcomes - the goal was to make connections, learn as much as possible and discover what might work for us. After four months, it is time to share my experiences with bigger audience.

Decorators are one of the most powerful tools Python has, but it may seem elusive to beginners. My first introduction to decorators was through Flask, the web framework. I didn’t really delve into it at that time, just accepted it as a part of the Flask framework that I was to use mindlessly. Maybe it was that way for you too, but you’re here—that means you want to change that. So let’s do it!

In September, members of Google's Chrome security team put forth a radical proposal: Kill off URLs as we know them. The researchers aren't actually advocating a change to the web's underlying infrastructure. They do, though, want to rework how browsers convey what website you're looking at, so that you don't have to contend with increasingly long and unintelligible URLs—and the fraud that has sprung up around them.