The concept of Test-Driven Development (TDD) isn’t particularly new anymore. But even after quite a few years of accompanying my code (regardless if it’s a Rails app or Chef infra code) with tests, TDD is still far from being second nature to me. I’ve recently watched a talk from RubyHACK 2018 which motivated me to get better at it.

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Earlier this year, I started live coding as an experiment in knowledge transfer for our team at freistil IT. You can read more about my motivation on the freistil Blog. In summer, I took a break to go on family holidays. But for a number of reasons (too many of them unpleasant), I didn’t pick up my regular schedule again until today. I’m happy to announce that Full Stack Live is back with a new concept!

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Wil Wheaton:

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After migrating my blog from WordPress to Jekyll (which was long overdue), I’m going to pick up writing again. This first new post is easy, because I’ve already written it for my company blog. It’s about my live coding stream on Twitch that I’ve been doing for a while now. It’s called “Full Stack Live”, a fitting name (I think) for a stream that covers all kinds of DevOps topics from Rails coding to operating Kubernetes (coming soon!).

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Managing people is an ability that requires practice and learning, just as any other. As the German proverb goes, "No master ever just fell from the sky." Regardless of how much you've thought about the topic, how much you've read about it or even taken courses, it's a fact that no amount of theory can compensate a lack of management practice. As Jason Fried says in "On being a bad manager": "Sure, you’ve listened to music for decades. But your first day on guitar sucks. Just like you may have watched people be managed — and you were likely managed yourself. That doesn’t prepare you to pick up the management instrument and strum a beautiful melody." People are messy. That's why leading people is messy, too. The problem with getting better at management is that there's no --dry-run option. It's like learning the guitar on stage. You'll get better over time but it comes with screwing things up in public, getting critical (or even devastating) feedback, and leaving the place feeling ashamed for not meeting your own expectations. Getting better as a manager is like assembling the plane after you've already jumped off the cliff. You might land as a master. Or crash spectacularly. There are people who are willing and able to deal with this kind of challenge. They're the right candidates for switching from being an individual contributor to a management position. For all the others (probably the majority), we'll have to provide other avenues for growth.

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In "Who can blame Melania for resisting her Easter egg role?", the Irish Times suggests using the vacant East Wing of the White House to install a First Shrink. I suggest launching a Center for Megalomaniac Studies. He did promise lots of new jobs, didn't he?

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The Irish Times reports that computer science gets an upgrade in secondary education. That's very good news.

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I have a man crush on Simon Sinek. I consider his book "Start with Why" essential reading for every entrepreneur and leader. I also did his Why Course and found out amazing things about what drives me. He's even better in person. Go watch his talk "Understanding the Game We're Playing" at Creative Mornings and get some inspiration to practice empathy: Here's the follow-up Q&A, too:

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Marco Arment: “What I hadn’t considered was that even though I had common tasks that could fit within the MacBook’s limited specs — email, writing, chat — all of them required a lot of typing. Oops.” That’s one of the reasons why I decided to go for a Macbook Pro 13" as replacement of my old MacBook Air 11", despite of the weight. All my work has to do with typing, be it in a browser, a terminal or even in Word.

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