Tweak in full text feed

I just realized that the RSS feed with full text didn’t actually put the full text in the description tags, though it did put it in the content:encoded tag. Some aggregators might not show the content:encoded contents. Anyhow, it’s fixed now.

The personal side

I’ve seen various bloggers mention that they find people want to see the personal side of the person whose blog they read. For a variety of reasons (not all of which are clear even to myself), I’d like to maintain a separation to some degree. But, if there are any of you out there who want more personal stuff, I’ve got a LiveJournal blog set up where the personal stuff (and the quiz results and the memes) all go. You can read it either at www.livejournal.com/users/andyt or via it’s (excerpted) RSS feed at www.livejournal.com/users/andyt/rss.

I’ll get links put into the side bar for both of these.

More site updates

Made a few more changes to the sidebar for the blog today…

1. The Bloggers and Links Sections has been replaced with a Blogs I Read section with lots more links. These links are now more closely aligned with the list in my aggregator, and the section is handled through www.blogrolling.com. Currently, the order they’re in reflects a descending sort on the number of posts I have stored in my aggregator (generally because something in the post was something I found particularly interesting or wanted to refer back to) and within a group of the same number of stored posts, an ascending alphabetic sort. This sorting was done manually, though I’d like to pull together a Ruby script that automatically updated the BlogRoll settings. We’ll see. Anyhow, for those of you who read this as an RSS feed, there is an RSS version of the links available here.
2. I added a currently reading section, thanks to www.allconsuming.net. As I progress through school, various text books and dissertation books and other books will go through my reading list. This list will share that info with anyone who cares about what I’m reading. It’s also available as an RSS feed, here
3. Links for both those RSS feeds were added to the side.

I have some more plans for the site, including a graphics change, but they’re probably a while off. Look for more real content in the near future.

Update to my blog’s RSS feeds

One of my biggest complaints about how Movable Type handled this blog in its default configuration was the excerpting of the text. I wanted to see the entire contents of my post in the XML feed, since I like to read offline and find myself favoring blogs whose RSS feeds have the full text. Thanks to The Shifted Librarian (who got it from Big Pink Cookie who got it from Dive Into Mark), I’ve updated the former RSS 0.91 template to be RSS 2.0 with full text content. I kept the RSS 1.0 rdf file as excerpted entries. This way any of you readers who subscribe to the RSS feed can pick which format you want. Simply use “http://blackbox.cs.fit.edu/blog/andy/index.rdf” if you want excerpts and “http://blackbox.cs.fit.edu/blog/andy/index.xml” if you want full text.

If anyone’s curious, the direct link to the info at Dive Into Mark is http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/09/26/rss_20_template.html.

RSS Feeds back up, sort of

I seem to like posting in threes lately — I don’t intend to make this a habit.

If anyone besides myself is actually subscribed to the RSS Feeds that I create/host they may have noticed that the feeds didn’t update for a bit this week. Turns out my task scheduler jobs didn’t run with me logged out (guess I misinterpreted how it was going to use the user id/password it said it would run as). I’ve moved the jobs to my laptop, but since that’s not guaranteed to be on at any particular time of the day, I can’t automatically schedule the jobs. I’m going to be trying to keep up with things by running the scripts manually for the summer, but please bear with me if there’s a day or two between updates sometimes (particularly as I have some traveling to do this summer).

Also, if there are other pages you’d like to see have RSS feeds created for, feel free to post a comment here with the URL and I’ll add it to my list.

More Ruby RSS ideas

It occurred to me while I was writing the previous entry that there may be a way I could help with the information filtering part of things. I don’t want to turn this blog into entries with lots of links. There’ll be links, but I want the point to remain my thoughts (with links to sources for what triggered the thoughts or supporting elements) rather than an aggregation.

BUT, since I’m already in the process of writing Ruby scripts to generate RSS feeds, and given that my aggregator (SharpReader) allows me to lock entries to save them (and stores everything in easily accessible XML caches), I could write a script that generates an RSS file of the entries that I’ve locked. These entries will always be a post that I want to remember for some reason — I might have seen connections, found the entry fascinating, or simply wanted to come back to it.

If I were to make an RSS feed available of my locked posts (which would be the best of the 158 feeds (and growing) that I read, at least in my opinion), would this be a helpful thing? I don’t plan to be systematic about it, or categorize things, or even add my own thoughts about them (though I intend to do that in entries here). All the feed would offer would be an aggregation of my idea of the interesting bits of the feeds as I receive them, with one addition — the name of the originating blog prepended to the text.

Would anyone be offended at seeing their blog entry in such a feed? All the links and everything would be as taken from their original feed.

Professional development

My wife and I were talking at dinner tonight and she brought up the question of how someone new to testing would find the various resources that exist to help testers grow professionally.

I thought for a moment, and realized that I couldn’t come up with a better answer than “do a google search”. A couple of other methods came to mind as well (“browse the bookstore” and “break into a network of colleagues”), but neither one is necessarily common.

For example, when I was doing technical interviews for a consulting company, I would always ask a question that I had been asked in an interview — “What publications (books, magazines, mailing lists, web sites, etc.) do you read to grow and maintain your skills in testing (or development or whatever)?” A remarkable person was one who could list even one source. Several people responded they picked up random magazines their developers left lying around some times. Most people responded with “I don’t know” (which cost them points in my opinion of whether they should be working for a consulting company). Some of that last class did manage to win back some (but not all) of their points — they asked me what sources I used.

My experience in technical interviews is not widespread — I’ve done maybe twenty or twenty-five, and they were all in one geographical area and for one company. Maybe results would be different now. I also did these interviews no more recently than a year ago, and perhaps the economic climes have made people think to do more of this kind of development.

So, given that there is this wealth of information out there, is there a better way to make it accessible to people coming into the field? Part of me feels like there should be, though I can’t for the life of me imagine what it would be. Another part of me says that if I can have found the pieces of information that I have (and I make no claims of knowing all of them, though I can overwhelm anyone who asks me for testing resources , other people should be able to, and they can find a lot of it simply by using google. A simple search on “software testing” yields around 227,000 entries.

But if I put aside this curmudgeonly attitude (“Bah! In my day, we didn’t have google! We had to write the articles ourselves and we liked it!”), I come to the two-pronged question of if people aren’t doing the basic searches to find information that will help them grow in their chosen careers, why don’t they do these things and is there some way to make people aware of the resources available to them?

The first part of the question is answered most often by the simple fact that people don’t think the information is out there and/or just plain don’t think to look for it. The people that I’ve shared resources with have all been surprised that such things existed. I do have a bias in this, in that if I think someone wouldn’t appreciate a reference, I’m not apt to go digging it up and sharing it in the first place. Still, let’s assume for the moment that the cause of people not doing the search is the idea never occurs to them. Tgis then makes the second part of the question even more important. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer to the question. The concept of not thinking to do a web search and browse a bookstore (or search an online one) is so utterly foreign to me that I’m having trouble envisioning a solution. Maybe I’m completely heading down the wrong track even — it’s easy enough (or so it seems to me) to get a deluge of information, that what I should be thinking about is more how to filter that information down.

I’m not sure… I feel like there’s an idea bouncing around in my head, but it’s not ready to come out yet. This is still a new feeling for me (it’s happened multiple times since I became a graduate student, but rarely before that (and never as strongly). This will probably be a topic I revisit…

Creating RSS Files with Ruby

Another thing Johanna mentioned in her blog was that I was working on a tool for generating RSS files for web sites that don’t already have them. This description perhaps oversells what I have by a bit. What I’ve got is a collection of Ruby scripts, scheduled to run nightly. Each script generates an RSS page for a single web page or site. This page contains links to the publicly available feeds that I provide. At the moment, there are two – the front page of stickyminds.com and the recent changes page of the Context-Driven Testing Wiki. There is a list of pages that I intend to scrape however, and so more will be added as time allows.

I’ve got a few more feeds planned as well in addition to web scrapings. The first one I’ll be developing is a deadline reminder feed. The plan for it is to have a Ruby script that pulls records out of Outlook and puts them in feeds so that I get reminders of the dates. Watch the RSS Feeds page for more details.

The Three-Year Plan

As I was driving home from Orlando one night, I had a revelation. When I came to grad school, I felt like I had no plan for the future after school was done. Graduation was this big brick wall and there was nothing after that. This past year, I’ve seen a lot of my attitudes change. It hit me all of a sudden that I was in the midst of a three-year process. I don’t know particularly where this idea came from, but it no longer feels like there’s nothing after graduation.

The process I mentioned has three parts (combining elegantly with the three years). The first year is a process of finding myself professionally. This has been happening over the course of the past year. I started the school year not sure that I wanted to be in testing or even software development. Now I have a much better sense of who I am professionally. I’m not simply a tester nor am I simply a developer. I’m an amalgamation of the two. But even that does not cover everything either. I’m also a trainer. I’m extremely interested in a bunch of open source and free tools – tools like Eclipse, xUnit, Ruby, and tools of that sort. I’ve decided to start a business focusing on developing, giving, and consulting on testing with these tools. My interests have also lately expanded lately to include blogs and RSS feeds. I have a plan and am beginning to pull together the skills and resources to accomplish that plan.

Before it can come to full fruition, however, there are two more process phases to go through. Year 2 involves finding my voice in the community. Growing up, I always felt like people weren’t interested in hearing my opinions and thoughts. I dealt with this by learning to listen well but not sharing much myself. I never developed the skills or trained myself to do this. Since accomplishing my career goals requires knowledge sharing and contribution, this is a skill I need to develop. This coming year is the time for me to work on my skills and find my voice. This will take the form of blog entries, conference presentations (with papers associated with them), and maybe even articles.

Phase three combines a knowledge of myself professionally with the knowledge of voice professionally. This phase is where I solidify a leadership position. I’m less sure of completely what this entails. I know I’m definitely not thinking of a management position. I think what I want is more of a thought leader/industry leader type thing. I’m also not sure exactly what the steps are to get there. Obviously, part of this is figuring out how to have original and useful thoughts.

It feels like I’m being conceited to say that two years from now I will be an industry leader. I think this is a attainable goal. As I work towards it, I intend to use this blog to document the process.

Interacting with conference speakers

I’ve spent this week attending the STAR East conference in Orlando. Johanna Rothman, who was also there, posted an entry in her blog encouraging people to attend conferences and get to know the speakers. I wholeheartedly agree with her sentiments. I don’t attend conferences expecting to learn new things from the sessions. While certainly I do learn things from the speakers in the sessions, for me it’s just as important to meet new people, renew ties with people I’ve met in the past, and interact with the community of software testers face to face. It’s also important to me to get more experience speaking and sharing my ideas with people (that’s another entry, however).

That’s my personal perspective as a tester/community member. As a speaker myself, I feel a bit like being so strongly in support of conferences not being primarily about the sessions. Of course, I want people to learn things from my presentations. I’d be ecstatic if someone came up up to me after one and said that something I said was worth the price of the conference itself. Part of me would wonder, though, too, if perhaps they had missed out on chances for networking.

This does lead to some questions though. I know many people don’t feel confident enough to approach anyone, especially someone whose name they might recognize as someone who is a leader in the field. Having done this myself, however, I can attest that no person I’ve ever approached at a conference has bitten my head off. Quite the contrary, in fact. I’ve found the people I’ve approached to be passionate people, interested in sharing and furthering their knowledge, interested in conversing about subjects.

I do keep a few guidelines in mind when I approach people, though. Some of these come out of my own experience talking to people after I speak, others are things that are just the way I’ve always done things, and some are just common sense. I’m sure more items could be added to the list, and people may even disagree with these (and if they do, I hope they let me know!). Anyhow, here’s my guidelines:

• Be friendly but not fawning. Everyone likes to hear praise, but too much flattery tends to sour things.
• Immediately after the speaker’s presentation is not generally the best time to try to have deep and detailed conversations with a speaker. When I’ve just finished a presentation, my adrenaline levels are high. It’s a rush to do a presentation, particularly if I feel like the presentation went well. After the peak, adrenaline levels bottom out. It generally takes me an hour or two after a presentation before I am really back to any sort of conversational ability. I’m afraid I may have come across as curt or uninterested to people when that was the furthest thing from my intention simply because I wasn’t able to give their ideas the responses they deserve. I try to be sensitive to this and ask people if I can follow up with them on the idea after the conference, and try to stick to that promise to follow up, but sometimes I fail to convey this properly.
• Sometimes speakers put an email address in their presentation materials. I’ve never presented at a conference that required the speakers to do this, and I would be surprised to hear of one that did. Since this information is not mandatory, a speaker who does put an email address in a presentation is explicitly giving others permission to initiate contact, in my opinion.
• Above all, remember that speakers are people too, subject to the same emotions, the same fears, and the same concerns that you have.

Initiating contact with speakers has brought about some of the major milestones of my career, and I heartily agree with Johanna’s recommendations.