Working on overcoming Imposter Syndrome

For a couple of years now, I saw conference talks on the imposter syndrome coming up every now and then, from different people in the field. Ever since I started to deal with my own “manipulator”, I figured it could be helpful to some people out there interested in trying the first steps in overcoming imposter syndrome on their own. Please note that the following has helped me in my journey. I don’t dare to say this will work all the time for everyone. It worked for me. So, maybe someone else is similarly as weird as I am, and it helps that person, too.

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“I’m an architect.’

A few years back, I ran a public course in Düsseldorf, Germany. While looking through my options for one of the evenings, I noticed a public Coding Dojo run by the Softwarkskammer group there and decided to have some coding fun in the evening. During the dojo, I had an experience with one of the attendees that I keep on sharing every now and then.

I think I wrote up on this a while ago. Since I keep on referring to that experience, I thought maybe a reflection on what I think happened a few years later, might be helpful.

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Team interaction pattern: the ambassador

A couple of times, I found a particular pattern of interaction from a team with some other group (or team) useful. I would not recommend it all the time, but there appear to be appropriate use cases every now and then. Since I didn’t cross similar thoughts in the Team Topologies book, I thought it useful to write up as inspiration for others. Let me introduce the ambassador to a team.

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Follow-up on: How do you automate tests through the GUI?

This blog entry is a follow-up answer I got after my tutorial session on ATDD/BDD at the recent SoCraTes conference in Soltau, Germany (YAY! We’re back to conferring in person!) After showing the participants how I struggle with a new (to me) ATDD/BDD testing framework, raw and unscripted, alongside answering questions raised by the attending participants, one person approached me with a question that I could not answer on the spot directly since I needed a break. Although I offered to get back to me later during the conference days, we never got to chat again. Maybe this might be of some help to others.

All that said, the question raised as I recall understanding it was something like this:

How would you test an application on the user interface? We have this old application, pretty old, and we just seem able to hook examples exemplifying business rules by going through the GUI.

My elobarate answer(s) and perspective(s) are the following.

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