Top all-time · #1754
Gojko Adzic
Personal blog · gojko.net · on HN as adzicgprogrammingcareerstartups
Gojko Adzic writes Gojko's blog, a personal blog at gojko.net about programming, career and startups. Since 2008, 44 different Hacker News readers have linked it 145 times, most often “The key lesson from our serverless migration”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-24, and you can follow it by feed.
How this affects the traditional PM role, and what other people need to prepare for
Most-linked posts?
- The key lesson from our serverless migration5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-02-23
- Five things everyone should know about Unicode5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-11-08
- Serverless architectures: game changer or recycled fad?3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-08-27
- Deliberate Side-Products2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-12-01
- Thought provoking TDD exercise at the Software Craftsmanship conference2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-02-27
- Improving testing practices at Google2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-12-07
- The waterfall trap for “agile” projects2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-03-04
- The Play, the points, and the biggest lie in software2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-01-11
- Sprints, marathons and root canals2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-08-30
- How To Solve “Not Enough Time”2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-31
What Hacker News says?
FWIW, the "specifications can be tested" is nothing magical. It binds statements of the Cucumber spec to snippets of code using regular expressions. (The effect is about the same as titles given to blocks of code in Ruby's RSpec). The "it's not code" part of Cucumber is that the test document is something that a non-programmer won't freak out at manipulating. (But a developer would still have to make sure the code s…
Comment linking /books/specification-by-example/
on “Attempto Controlled English”Submitted Joe the Developer doesn’t need a certificate as a story · 46 points
HN discussionIf you need workflows, there's also VisualReview [1] with some basic workflow for approval testing, and Applitools [2], a commercial tool with integration with Selenium, Appium and Protractor that can do screenshot and video comparisons. I wrote about them as part of the 'Automated testing: back to the future' tools review [3]. In the article, I also mentioned DomReactor, but that seems to be discontinued now. [1] h…
Comment linking /2015/11/16/automated-testing-future/
on “Image-diff – Create an image differential between two images”Submitted Sprints, marathons and root canals as a story · 34 points
HN discussionYou need to provide evidence or a sense of where you're coming from, yes. But sometimes just tying in two disparate links can do that. http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/4424779/are-crowds-wise-... I make it clear what data I'm summarizing, but the summary also seems more timeless to me than the data. I can imagine it being derived from other books about the wisdom of crowds. Like this blog post: http://gojko.net/2…
Comment linking /2008/08/05/bulding-smart-teams
on “Why the lucky stiff: when you don't create things...”Submitted Redefining Software Quality as a story · 31 points
HN discussionThat's what's predicated by "Specification By Example" [1] practices. Gojko elaborates into the tooling and requirements preservation aspects in "Are tools necessary for acceptance testing, or are they just evil?"[2] [1] https://gojko.net/books/specification-by-example/ [2] https://gojko.net/2010/03/01/are-tools-necessary-for-accepta...
Comment linking /2010/03/01/are-tools-necessary-for-acceptance-testing-or-are-they-just-evil/
on “Ask HN: What software do you use to gather requirements?”Submitted Lazy web sites run faster as a story · 30 points
HN discussionAuthor here - Appraise is a new opensource tool for visual test automation. It’s like FitNesse, but for visuals, and working from Markdown that shows up nicely in GitHub repositories. Appraise can help you: - Automate acceptance/regression tests for visual look and feel in a visual language, rather than xUnit style code - Review and approve changes to web pages, visual layouts and browser components quickly through…
Comment linking /assets/appraise-screenshot.png
on “Show HN: Appraise – Visual test automation”Submitted The danger of releasing too early as a story · 19 points
HN discussionIf you know what Colab's definition of abusive or disallowed use is (or even whether they have such a definition), please let me know. This isn't meant as a gotcha -- I actually haven't been able to find a full TOS or anything like that, despite looking for one at the outset and then again while writing the linked post. If it exists I want to know. As I said in the post, the closest thing I can find is the FAQ at ht…
Comment linking /2017/10/05/serverless-design-gotocph.html
on “Hosting a GPT-2 autoresponder bot”Submitted Scale your website by splitting your data streams as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI can't say for certain these came from HN, but they most likely did, so here goes: Gojko Adzic's "TDD as if you meant it" article: http://gojko.net/2009/02/27/thought-provoking-tdd-exercise-a... William Zinsser's "Writing English as a Second Language": http://www.theamericanscholar.org/writing-english-as-a-secon... Steve Yegge's "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns": http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-…
Comment linking /2009/02/27/thought-provoking-tdd-exercise-at-the-software-craftsmanship-conference/
on “Ask HN: Your "Keeper" articles.”Submitted Delivering useful software as a story · 12 points
HN discussionThere are 13 users with 1000000+ and the top 100 all have over 450000. ( http://twitterholic.com/ ) But, long tail and all that, I hear average follower count is in the 120 range, you're right there. ( http://gojko.net/2009/03/16/qcon-london-2009-upgrading-twitt... )
Comment linking /2009/03/16/qcon-london-2009-upgrading-twitter-without-service-disruptions/
on “Twitter's peak load is only 200 tweets per second”Submitted Effective root cause analysis techniques as a story · 11 points
HN discussionFor starters, there's a few interesting links at http://highscalability.com/scaling-twitter-making-twitter-10... summary: "Rails and Ruby haven’t been stumbling blocks... The performance boosts associated with a “faster” language would give us a 10-20% improvement, but thanks to architectural changes that Ruby and Rails happily accommodated, Twitter is 10000% faster than it was in January" They're dealing with dupli…
Comment linking /2009/03/16/qcon-london-2009-upgrading-twitter-without-service-disruptions/
on “Twitter's peak load is only 200 tweets per second”Submitted Beware of the second worst programmer as a story · 10 points
HN discussion> This is known as Behaviour-driven development (BDD). FWIW, I'd say that "writing tests using a tool like RSpec/Cucumber/etc." isn't really "doing BDD" by itself. Tools like RSpec are a way of organising test code. I'd recommend "Specification by Example". IIRC the idea is to come up with example output of a feature, refine this to a specification. Tools like RSpec help align the test code with the specification. h…
Comment linking /books/specification-by-example/
on “Testing isn't everything”Submitted Efficiency is the enemy of effectiveness as a story · 9 points
HN discussionI think you're missing a huge point there in terms of time to market and stuff an organisation wants to deal with. No matter how good I get at server ops, Amazon will always be way better than me. They probably have patents on how to cool data centres. A small company, like mine, has to choose its battles if it's to launch products quickly, and competing in server maintenance isn't what will make those products bett…
Comment linking /2016/08/27/serverless.html
on “Learn to build serverless apps by competing in cloud tank warfare”Submitted Guardian pulling the plug? as a story · 7 points
HN discussionSubmitted How To Solve “Not Enough Time” as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Gojko Adzic » How is it even possible for code to be this bad? as a story · 6 points
HN discussionSubmitted Effective Exercises for teaching TDD as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Gojko Adzic » Paying programmers: are bonuses bad and what to do about it? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted The clouds are coming as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted The wrong way to do a shopping cart as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSubmitted Choosing the right JavaScript testing tool as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Five things everyone should know about Unicode as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
