#3usefulthings —#1 — NY resolutions, Testing world stagnation, and dopamine loops
#3usefulthings is a series of small blog posts with short overviews of some interesting and useful facts. Other issues: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Yesterday I’ve decided to start a personal digest with different useful stuff that made me think about something in a different perspective, wondered me or inspired.
I’ll write about different stuff: QA, management, event organization and community work, books and sci-pop articles. A bit of mess but all of it interests me.
And the very first issue in 2019 will be about NY resolutions, curiosity and philosophical doubts about the software testing world.
1) Learn to say “No” to opportunities. Two days agoI read this great article from Shai Reznik and it resonated with my personal thoughts. A lot of people promise themselves to start a lot of new things in 2019. But not so many people decide to stop some activities, even favorite ones. It takes a lot of self-control to narrow down your interests and conscientiously focus on a smaller amount of activities.
I tried that in 2018 (gave up a few hobbies and projects I like and stayed only with ones I can’t live without, like dancing and community work). That’s an amazing practice. Always chisel away the superfluous material.
P.S. I’m very glad we had Shai at DevFest Ukraine, he’s an amazing person and it’s great that #DFUA got into his conferences quota for 2018.
2) Is Software Testing world stagnating? A great twitter thread started by Katrina Clockie. Why do testing community discuss the same things over and over again? And why do developer conferences have so wider variety of topics and interesting materials?
That thought resonates with me so much. For a few years, I was helping a developer community, and only in 2018 I joined a testing one. Because GDG has so many topics and news that constantly appear. It really feels from time to time that the Testing world talks about pretty the same topics again and again.
It doesn’t mean I disrespect the field I’m working at. Vice versa: it motivates me to dig into some rare testing stuff and share it with others. If you are a tester, try to find some unusual article in Medium which is not related to your work and read it with curiosity…
3) Curiosity involves dopamine, that’s why we are pleasured to learn something new. In any public bio I need to write about myself I say “a curious [role]”. Curiosity makes me wanna play quizzes, listen to the podcasts and talk to people. That’s a leading emotion which always makes people feel like explorers. This video explains parts of curiosity stages in a human brain (the video is in Russian, but there is a great article in English).
So, I’m curious if this digest will survive and what it will look like. Let’s see at the end of 2019
