Scrappy Isn’t Scalable

What Being the Oldest Daughter in an Immigrant Family Taught Me About Resourcefulness (and When It Stops Serving You)

The Lone Tester: Surviving and Thriving as The First QA Hire

I've been the "first QA" in three different ways over the course of my career: as an advisor to a tiny startup that ultimately didn't make it, as the first quality hire in the satellite office of a company with an established QA team

Half-Baked, Fully Shipped: Thoughts on “Quality” in DX Core 4

Something about the DX Core 4 has been quietly bugging me… More specifically, about the “Quality” category and how something about it just doesn’t sit right. And the curious thing is, it’s not wrong! I do believe the key metric (Change Failure Rate) and secondary measures are really

Half-Baked, Fully Shipped: The Tradeoffs I’m Making With AI (And Why I’m Nervous)

I’ve been thinking a lot about AI lately. I think a lot. About a lot of things. Probably too much. But lately, it’s been AI. Specifically: how much I love using LLM chatbots for various tasks. And the thing is... I know they hallucinate. I know they’re

Tech Debt Took Down 4chan (Not Hackers)

What the site-killing hack reveals about maintenance neglect, quality culture, and the failures that build up when no one’s watching.

Are flaky tests just… inevitable?

I had an interview earlier today. Sometime during a chat with a possible future boss, a former colleague (now an engineering leader at this same company) walked in to say hi. We got to talking shop, and flaky automated tests came up. The two QA folks in the room joked

How to Translate QA Gaps into Hiring and Process Decisions

You’ve identified your quality gaps. Now what? Knowing what’s broken doesn’t automatically tell you how to fix it, and that’s the part where a lot of teams get stuck. So if you’re staring down a list of issues and wondering: Do we need to hire

How to Build the Right QA Team for Your Company

So, you’ve moved past the question "should we hire a QA?" and on to "what kind of QA do we actually need?"* In my last post, I talked about the QA roles that I think should exist and how I wish companies would evolve their

Half-Baked, Fully Shipped: Toilet Paper, Software Quality, and the Problem You Didn’t See Coming

No deep-dive posts this week (sometimes life just be lifin’, y’all). Instead, here’s another Half-Baked, Fully Shipped, courtesy of my toddler and his newfound passion for unrolling entire rolls of toilet paper. Have you ever tried to roll up a toilet paper roll after your toddler has completely

Half-Baked, Fully Shipped: Authenticity Is Your Currency

At some point - maybe soon - there’s going to be a market for real. For perspectives and voices that don’t feel like they were created by a machine. In a world where most content will created by AI, be the “real”. In the spirit of shipping fast,

The QA Team I Wish Every Company Had

So, I know I said last time that my next post would be about how much testing is enough. But… I changed my mind. And that’s fine, right? This blog is new, and honestly, I might be the only one reading it 😅. Instead, today I want to talk about

Testing Without Testers: Who Owns Quality When There’s No QA?

Lately, I’ve been spending some time looking into interesting companies. Part of it is curiosity, but mostly, I’ve been scoping out places I might want to work next 😅. One thing I’m noticing is that more and more companies don’t have a dedicated QA or testing function.