How adding a flex-wrap almost spiraled out of control

Joep Schuurkes

24 August 2025

How does a project get to be a year late?
…One day at a time.
- The Mythical Man-Month (anniversary edition), Frederick P. Brooks Jr., p. 153

Last week I found a minor bug in the application my team is building. For every election committee, we have a page showing all sessions of that committee. These sessions are shown as a row of cards. Playing around with the number of sessions, I discovered that the row keeps on growing, resulting in a horizontal scroll bar:

screenshot showing five committee session cards in a row, with the last one, all the way to the right, having only a small part of its left side visible

Some of the things I did after being off for a few weeks

Joep Schuurkes

2 July 2025

I wish people would share more of what they do day-to-day. Especially testers and quality engineers. Show the work you do. On the other hand, I do realize that that’s hard. You don’t want to share sensitive information. You want to respect the privacy of your team. And then there’s the whole practical side. How much of the context do you need to share to have an intelligible story?

Since my current project is open source and my team works in public, I have more options than most. So let’s see if this kind of post works out.

Last week was my first week back at work after a few weeks of vacation. So an important part of my week was catching up. Going through emails and chat messages. Talk with my fellow team members. Participate in the usual meetings. Some stuff that didn’t make it into this post. More importantly, there are three things I did, that give a good idea of what a significant part of my job looks like.

How essential are your testers?

Joep Schuurkes

21 May 2025

A question I don’t seem to be able to let go of is: where does a tester fit into a software development team? More specifically, how essential are testers to the team?

I think that there are basically three options:

Your testers do not add something essential.
It’s not clear if your testers add something essential.
Your testers do add something essential.

Your testers do not add something essential

I suspect this is becoming more and more common. Thanks to Agile, CI/CD, DevOps, improved tooling and changing expectations, you should not have testers that find the dumb bugs I was expected to find at the start of my career. If a programmer wrote a > where it should have been a >=, we should expect a unit test and not a tester to catch it.