One of the ways Octopus engineering changed as we scaled was by modifying our role definitions for engineers. We wanted to provide a resource for our engineering managers to give consistent guidance to our engineers for their careers at Octopus.  Our old definitions were fine and had worked well for us so far. We stored them in Github, so you can see them here. Here’s an example of one role: Senior Software Engineer I am a highly sought-after member of an Octopus team with a proven record of shipping high-quality code to production. I am trusted to ship shaped pitches (or vertical slices ..read more

Recently I started singing lessons again with a new teacher, after a couple of years’ hiatus. I love singing – I’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember, and started taking professional lessons on and off about 15 years ago. I’ve always wanted to get into performing but haven’t had the know-how or the confidence. Some of you might be surprised that a keynote speaker lacks the confidence to perform! But singing is a very personal, vulnerable thing for me. I’ve happily belted out some karaoke tunes now and again with my friends, but singing to an audience gives me the heebie-jeebies. I do ..read more

Up until the start of this year, I was running my own business as a sole trader doing a bunch of different stuff like test automation consulting, graphic design freelance work, mentoring, conference evangelism, art commissions, and more. Thanks to my international network, quite a lot of this work ended up being remote. Here’s some things I learned from working this way. —– 1. Scheduling meetings with potential clients is painful but Calendly helps I am not paid by Calendly for this message – I just love it so much. Working across timezones makes scheduling meetings over email especially hard ..read more

About a month ago I started a program called “Group Mentoring”. Now I have over 20 mentees, in 6 different countries! Crazy, right? What is group mentoring? Group mentoring is a series of hour-long online workshops tailored to your career goals. Each group has just 2-4 mentees, ensuring that your mentor has adequate time to spend with you during the session. Examples of session topics: Interview practice Advanced testing Test automation Career problems Public speaking …and more! So many mentees, so little time I’ve been mentoring tech professionals for about 10 years now, both as part of my da ..read more

One of my “aha” moments with painting was when I took a gouache class and thought oh this technique is so easy – it’s just like colouring in! But when I tried to teach a friend to do it, the gap in our experiences really showed. I didn’t realise how much I’d learned about drawing just from doing it for so long. Mixing colours, looking at real images in a way that makes them “flat” so that I can transfer them to a 2D drawing – these are things that I learned through years of practice. A pink beetle I painted. Gouache on paper. I think testing skill is the same. You can’t really say to someone ..read more

I am always surprised at how many software developers I meet who are reluctant to write unit tests. Writing good tests is a crucial part of becoming an expert software developer. The best developers I know all consider writing unit tests a crucial part of software development. All of the most successful software companies consider testing ability a vital selection criteria for promoting or hiring senior developers. But you don’t have to just take my word for it – I have collected quotes from software developers at top software companies to explain how testing their code made them into the top ..read more

Are you having trouble working out why your automated tests are failing? The next time you find yourself stuck, try my automated test debugging cheat sheet. It lists the most common issues that affect automated end-to-end tests based on my decades of experience dealing with them. I hope it saves you from some headaches. Download colour PDF | Download greyscale PDF If you would like to learn how to prevent and solve issues with your automated tests, sign up for my Foundations of Test Automation training course. You will learn how to write automated tests in a way that’s scalable, robust, and e ..read more

My friend, mentee and fellow ex-Googler Paulo Lai joins me for this blog post today as we discuss some of the recent books we’ve read and liked. Paulo and I love to read non-fiction books about business, technology, and self-improvement and we’re always sharing book recommendations with each other via email. So we thought we’d share some of our recommendations with the rest of the world. We read an awful lot of books, so this could be the first in a long series! The Lost Art of Listening The Lost Art of Listening, Second Edition: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships Paulo I rec ..read more