Testing

Episode 33: From intern to CEO with agile testing expert Alex Schladebeck

December 22, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Testing, Women in Tech 0:50:08

In this episode, I talk to Alex Schladebeck, a testing expert, and a powerful voice in the tech community. Alex is the CEO of Bredex, a dev shop that offers tailor-made IT solutions but also specializes in quality assurance and testing.

A decade ago, Alex graduated in linguistic and came into tech by accident. So, I obviously have to ask her about her career transition, and testing.

What we talk about:

  • transitioning into tech from a non-traditional background
  • what it takes to get from an intern position to becoming the CEO 
  • which role testing plays at Bredex
  • how mob or ensemble programming is used to facilitate learning
  • how to lead remote software teams
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Episode 31: Combatting tech debt in war rooms

November 24, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Hiring, Productivity, Testing 00:53:32

In this episode, I talk to Tomasz Łakomy, a senior frontend engineer at OLX Group. Tomasz is fascinated about teaching everything he knows and has over 170 video tutorials.  

We talk about:

  • how they develop, test, and reviews software at OLX group,  
  • what war rooms are and how they help to combat technical debt,
  • how he managed to create over 170 video tutorials about software engineering,
  • why he is AWS certified as a front-end engineer, and
  • how skydiving helped him to be a better software developer.
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Episode 29: No mocks allowed – A testing discussion with Kent C. Dodds

October 27, 2020 michaela Open Source, Testing 00:53:38

In this episode, I talk to Kent C. Dodds, a software engineer, and teacher. Before starting his entrepreneurial journey, Kent has been working for PayPal. He is a major open source contributor and also the creator and maintainer of the widely used open-source testing-library.

Code that he writes is used by millions of people around the world, and he also teaches thousands of engineers how to test their JavaScript systems, and how to work with React.

We talk about:

  • Why you should not mock your software system during testing,
  • how “testing library” helps create more meaningful and maintainable tests,
  • if and how manual testing is still needed to increase your confidence in the software system.
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Episode 28: How design systems help create an inclusive user experience at Github

October 13, 2020 michaela Company Culture, Remote Work, Testing, Women in Tech 00:45:12

In this episode, I talk to Diana Mounter, the Director of Design Infrastructure at GitHub. Diana traveled the world and lived in many different countries – even continents. She started as a print designer and spent some time in government before she got into web and design. Now, she leads the design systems at GitHub.

We talk about:

  • what design systems are and why we need them,
  • how GitHub deals with legacy code and refactoring.
  • how the designer role interplays with other roles at GitHub,
  • how and why designers do code reviews,
  • and how GitHub strives for inclusive designs that make everyone feel like an expert.
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Episode 24: Why you should double down on integration tests with Kent C. Dodds

August 18, 2020 michaela DevOps, Open Source, Testing 00:58:00

In this episode, I talk to Kent C. Dodds, a software engineer, and teacher. Before starting his entrepreneurial journey, Kent has been working for PayPal. He is a major open source contributor and also the creator and maintainer of the widely used open-source testing-library.

Code that he writes is used by millions of people around the world, and he also teaches thousands of engineers how to test their JavaScript systems, and how to work with React.

We talk about:

  • best practices in testing modern software systems, 
  • the testing pyramid and it’s “successor” the testing trophy,
  • why integration tests might be more beneficial than unit tests,
  • how you should avoid testing implementation details,
  • and how testing sentiments have changed over the last 10 years. 
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