Fergal.blog

About

• Fergal Crawley, Software Test Automation Engineer at CelticQA Solutions
• Webmaster and owner: ForumCoin, Now Password & Press F11
• Let's connect on LinkedIn
• Site kindly hosted by GitHub

May 2024

Reading

• 52 Ways to Walk by Annabel Streets

Learning and Projects

• Google Technical Support course
• Local election canvassing for a Green Party candidate

Work

• Scripting an automated test solution for a Biotech client
• Writing test cases for a global floor covering provider

Links

• Notepad Tab
• Drone Flying 101
• The Pen Hospital in Kolkata
• If you're seeing this, I'm in jail
• Cloudflare took down our website
• I Sold TinyPilot, My First Successful Business
• Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search's Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked

April 2024

Reading

• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• Time Travel a History (Chapters 1 - 3) by James Gleick

Learning and Projects

• Fundamentals of computer networking
• Built a DIY project, electronic lantern and torch

Work

• Scripting an automated test solution for a Biotech client
• Writing test cases for a global floor covering provider
• Regression testing and automation for an international sporting brand, ecommerce website

Links

• Voicemail Inbox
• No one buys books
• Start Your Own ISP
• World Wide Web - CERN
• Obituary for a Quiet Life
• Progress is not automatic
• Use Your Potions and Scrolls
• So you wanna de-bog yourself
• Why you need a "WTF Notebook"
• The Techno-Optimist Manifesto
• Stop Acting Like You're Famous
• Self-hosting forms, the sane way
• How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland?
• I Nearly Died Drowning. Here's What it's Like to Survive.
• A moment that changed me: I was divorced, broke and alone - but I turned my life around with a list

March 2024

Reading

• Siddharta by Hermann Hesse

Learning and Projects

• Performance testing using JMeter
• Fundamentals of computer networking

Work

• Scripting an automated test solution for a Biotech client
• Writing test cases for a global floor covering provider
• Performance testing a client ERP application using JMeter and Ranorex
• Exploratory and regression testing of an international sporting brand, ecommerce website

Links

• Guess My RGB
• The Best Essay
• Read it never...
• Prompt engineering
• How to Start Google
• Breaking Down Tasks
• Why Don't You Use ...
• Where All the Time Went
• Google's Bug Hunting Community
• Home Lab Beginners guide (Hardware)
• I spend £8,500 a year to live on a train
• We are under DDoS attack and we do nothing
• What It's Like to Staff the Home of a Billionaire
• How to Free Up Space in Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive
• Meet the Mad Scientist Who Wrote the Book on How to Hunt Hackers

February 2024

Reading

• Cures of Ireland by Cecily Gilligan
• Soul Cards by Hailey Rene

Learning and Projects

• Performance testing using JMeter
• Fundamentals of computer networking

Work

• Performance testing a client ERP application using JMeter and Ranorex

Links

• Mastering Programming
• No vehicles in the park
• I built my own 16-Bit CPU in Excel
• Making a PDF that's larger than Germany
• I don't want anything your AI generates
• 14509 books summarized in 5 bullet points
• Cloudflare defeats patent troll Sable at trial
• Nvidia Is Now More Valuable Than Amazon And Google
• Our Company is Doing So Well That You are All Fired
• Let Me Tell You A Secret (about software consulting)
• The boring technology behind a one-person Internet company
• 12-Year-Old Builds Replica Of Archimedes' Death Ray - And It Works
• How to do things if you're not that smart and don't have any talent
• Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake "chief financial officer"
• The Shirky Principle: Institutions Try to Preserve the Problem to Which They Are the Solution

January 2024

Reading

• The Moderator by Chris Gray

Learning and Projects

• Performance testing using JMeter

Work

• Performance testing a client ERP application

Links

• Typing Game
• Losing my son
• The 44 best pens for 2024
• Think about what to focus on
• Where have all the websites gone?
• We Could Fix Everything, We Just Don't
• The best employees focus on content not process
• Sex, aggression, and humour: responses to unicycling
• Aim, fire, scan: the 80/20 of executing on big projects
• How to deal with receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Big Tech
• The surprising connection between after-hours work and decreased productivity

December 2023

Reading

• Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger

Work

• Exploratory and regression testing of an international sporting brand, ecommerce website.

Links

• Make someone
• Walk and Talk
• Wikimedia Projects
• AI and Mass Spying
• Go Testing By Example
• This Person Does NOT Exist
• HTML, The Programming Language
• The Time Julius Caesar Was Captured by Pirates
• How to run a small social network site for your friends

November 2023

Reading

• The Art of Logic by Eugenia Cheng

Learned About and Projects

• AI development and tools.
• Experimented with various AI tools for generating videos, images and text.

Links

• Becoming a magician
• You Are Already There
• Call yourself titles
• My $500M Mars Rover Mistake: A Failyre Story
• How AI detectors can destroy innocent writers' livelihoods
• Automata: The Extraordinary "Robots" Designed Hundreds Of Years Ago - Video
• Staring into the abyss as a core life skill
• My favorite essays of life advice
• Becoming a Magician
• 10 hard-to-swallow truths they won't tell you about software engineer job
• A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft
• World First: Live Birth Of “Chimeric” Monkey With High Contribution From Stem Cells
• Fergal Brennan
• Your Idea Is Brilliant, Your Idea Is Worthless
• What If Someone Steals My Idea?
• The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday
• Animated Text Generator
• A Project of One's Own
• Flexcode Software
• Be impatient
• The book club that spent 28 years reading Finnegans Wake
• They're Made out of Meat
• Email obfuscation: What works in 2023?
• Hammock Driven Development - Rich Hickey - Video
• The Bond villain compliance strategy
• Explore Websites

October 2023

Reading

• The Art of Logic by Eugenia Cheng

Learned About

• Selenium test automation.
• C# object orientated programming

Work

• Automated testing of a website, using C# Selenium

Projects

• Published Hamster Link 🐹

Links

• Thoughts
• Write Freely
• Career Advice
• Internet Artifacts
• Walled Off Hotel
• Find Your Pi Day
• The First Website
• The ingenious cardboard bed
• Publish Public Domain Books
• Write more "useless" software
• Scrollbars are becoming a problem
• ONE REVOLUTION PER MINUTE
• THE BEST INVENTIONS OF 2023
• Array sorters aren't problem solvers
• FORTY YEARS OF PROGRAMMING
• How I stay motivated as a solo-creator
• I Accidentally Saved Half A Million Dollars
• For crying in the beer, stop writing unit tests!
• In search of the least viewed article on Wikipedia
• Here’s your guide to landing a job in cybersecurity
• How I Created a Podcast in 2 Hours for Less Than $35
• Patrick Stewart Boldly Explores His Own Final Frontier
• I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor
• Hacker Answers Penetration Test Questions From Twitter
• NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12 billion miles away
• Google Brain founder says big tech is lying about AI extinction danger
• That Time the City of Seattle Accidentally Gave Me 32m Emails for 40 Dollars
• Elon Musk's 'Algorithm,' a 5-Step Process to Dramatically Improve Nearly Anything
• Ten Years Ago, the “Sad Zoo Kid” Photo Became an Emblem of the 2013 Government Shutdown. Here’s the Story Behind It

September 2023

Reading

• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle (again)

Learned About

• Selenium test automation.
• C# object orientated programming

Work

• Creating framework for automated testing of a website, using C# Selenium
• Unit testing for C# MVC app

Links

• Short bursts of daily activity linked to reduced cancer risk
• The place where no humans will tread for 100,000 years
• I built a Plane Spotter for my son in 120 seconds
• Definitely Do Not Put Plastic in the Microwave
• Johnny Cash Has Been EVERYWHERE (Man)!
• Turning an old car into a powerful generator
• Building an economy simulator from scratch
• It's okay to Make Something Nobody Wants
• How (not) to apply for a software job
• Find all subdomains of any domain
• Longest website and Longest page
• Find Time to Read the Classics
• A Senior Engineer's CheckList
• Akiyoshi's illusion pages
• 30 thoughts on turning 30
• Message Board in Assembly
• How to Do Things
• Webring Technology
• Lie still in bed
• Michael Lynch
• IndieWeb
• Lobste.rs

August 2023

Reading

• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

Learned About

• GitHub Actions for workflow automation.
• C# object orientated programming

Work

• Reviewing and evaluating various paid and free test automation tools
• Unit testing for C# MVC app

Links

• The Egg
• Toki Pona
• ToS Notify
• Competence
• Carrot Problems
• Stopping at 90%
• Splitting the Web
• I Love Philosophy
• 100 Year Domains
• Cloudflare Speedtest
• Test smarter, not harder
• How to Inherit a Fortune
• Easyful Digital Commerce
• Write about what you learn
• So You Want to Learn Physics
• The Well, the World's Most Influential Online Community
• Before you try to do something, make sure you can do nothing
• Hundreds of thousands trafficked to work as online scammers
• How to Do Things: Productivity for the Productivity-Challenged
• The Elite's War on Remote Work Has Nothing to Do with Productivity

July 2023

Reading

• Coders by Clive Thompson

Learned About

• GitHub Actions for workflow automation.
• C# object orientated programming

Work

• Unit testing framework for C# MVC app

Projects

• A lot of time off this month.

Links

• No CSS Club
• The Gimli Glider
• The past is not true
• How to Do Great Work
• Kevin David Mitnick RIP
• Learn electronics by practice
• AI and the automation of work
• At this company, we are family
• A Few Notes on Problem Solving
• Why Software Development is Hard
• Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
• No One Wants To Talk To Your Chatbot
• For the Love of God, Stop Microwaving Plastic
• Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born
• Google restricting internet access to some employees to reduce cyberattack risk

June 2023

Reading

• In Praise of Walking by Shane O'Mara

Learned About

• Code, The Hidden Language of Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold - Revising chapters on addition and subtraction using logic gates.
• C# procedural and object orientated programming

Work

• Setting up unit testing framework for C# MVC app
• Setting up Git repo and writing processes for source control.

Projects

• Longest walk: 8.8 KM

Links

• Amazon's First Job Ad
• The Online Books Page
• Lemmy List of communities
• Rowan Atkinson on free speech
• The best general advice on earth
• Real Time Server Attacks - Brute.Fail
• Google's Generative AI Learning Path
• Johnny Decimal Project Orgainisation
• The Man Who Won The Lottery 14 Times Using Maths
• Building a Programming Language in Twenty-Four Hours
• Take Your Ultrawide Monitors Everywhere With an AR Laptop
• Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems
• The husband-and-wife forgers who fooled the art market — and made millions

May 2023

Reading

• How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
• The Stairlift Ascends by Helen O'Rahilly

Learned About

• Code, The Hidden Language of Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold - Revising early chapters
• Using UiPath for RPA - Intermediate courses on UiPath Academy
• C# procedural and object orientated programming
• Intro to C# MVC

Work

• Commencing work on C# MVC, QA app
• Automated testing for life sciences client.

Projects

• Passed the one million posts milestone on ForumCoin
• Longest walk: 8 KM

Links

• Eye Candy
• The last post
• War is a Racket
• Startup Playbook
• Moderator Mayhem
• How I fixed My Mindset
• The Open Buddhist University
• The Miracle of Pakistani Tekken
• How to Put the Internet in a Box
• My pay went from $240,000 to $0
• The first guy who heard a parrot talk
• Do the weirdest thing that feels right
• MusicLM: Generating Music From Text
• This blog is hosted on my Android phone
• The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise
• Outsourced V's Paid Software Test Automation Tools
• Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
• Noise Is All around Us—and It’s Affecting You More than You Think

Apr 2023

Reading

• Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
• How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren - to chapter 11

Learned About

• CSS, from Colt Steele's Web Developer Bootcamp on Udemy
• Code, The Hidden Language of Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold - Revising early chapters
• Using UiPath for RPA - Intermediate courses on UiPath Academy

Work

• Writing blog content on the topic of test automation.
• Building automated test solutions for a Biotech client (gene sequencing) using Ranorex, C#, SQL and API requests.

Projects

• Longest walk: 6.8 KM

Links

• Event Loops
• Space Elevator
• Solar Powered Blog
• Caricatures Ireland
• Dishwasher salmon
• 24 Hour Homepage
• Startup Reading List
• Stop Looking For Mentors
• The 42 Best Pens for 2023
• 50 Ideas That Changed My Life
• So I only ate potatoes for 2 weeks
• There's no such thing as a fresh start
• The man who walked around the world
• The days are long but the decades are short
• Understanding Google's Bug Bounty Program
• The Pendulum Swings: How To Respond To Tech's Downturn
• Think of language models like ChatGPT as a “calculator for words”
• Night of the living brain fog dead, or how I hacked myself better thanks to open source software.

Mar 2023

Reading

• Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper
• Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker - to chapter 7

Learned About

• Introduction to HTML and CSS, from Colt Steele's Web Developer Bootcamp on Udemy
• Code, The Hidden Language of Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold - Feedback and Flip Flops and Building a Digital Clock
• Using UiPath for RPA - Intorductory courses on UiPath Academy

Work

• Building automated test solutions for a Biotech client (gene sequencing) using Ranorex, C#, SQL and API requests.

Projects

• Longest walk: 6.1 KM
• Created a Wise Old Man character on Character.ai

Links

• Forgiveness
• How to find your passion
• What I Learned At Stripe
• 5 strategies for giving more
• ALL YOU MAY NEED IS HTML
• Life is a game. This is your strategy guide
• Software is too expensive to build cheaply
• Shifting Your Perception After Being Laid Off
• Malvertising on Google Ads: It's Hiding in Plain Site
• Art Video - Out of all things one, and out of one all things
• How to Earn Six Figures as a Software Engineer in the UK
• An opinion after 40 years of coding - Programming Languages
• How Poor Sleep Drove Me Insane, and My Long Path to Recovery
• Change your mind with these gateway drugs to intellectual humility

February 2023

Reading

• Antinet Zettelkasten by Scott P. Scheper - to chapter 8
• How to Get Focused by Scott Scheper
• Sleep by Lisa Varadi

Learned About

• Git - completed Colt Steele's excellent course on Udemy
• Code, The Hidden Language of Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold, reviewed to chapter 15

Work

• Building automated test solutions for a Biotech client (gene sequencing) using Ranorex, C#, SQL and API requests.

Projects

• Longest walk: 6 KM
• Continued writing an eBook

Links

• Self hosting in 2023
• I Am The Only User
• I ❤️ MICROSCOPES
• Anjan Hosh Photography
• I Want to Lose EVery Debate
• I Assume I am Below Average
• If You Struggle With Patience
• Screw motivation, what you need is discipline

January 2023

Reading

• How to Get Focused, Part I, II & III by Scott Scheper
• All You Need is Less by Vicki Vrint
• Dune by Frank Herbert

Learned About

• Git - Rebasing, Tags, Hashing, Git Objects and RefLogs
• Code, The Hidden Language of Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold, chapters 16 & 17: subtraction using logic gates and flip flops

Work

• Building automated test solutions for a Biotech client (gene sequencing) using Ranorex, C#, SQL and API requests.

Projects

• Longest walk: 9 KM
• Started writing an eBook

Links

• Life is Short
• The Network State
• YouTube Addiction
• How To Learn Stuff Quickly
• The Cab Ride I'll Never Forget
• Stanford on Recent Tech Layoffs
• Starting a StartUp in a Bad Economy
• How To Be Resilient: 5 Steps To Success When Life Gets Hard

December 2022

Reading

• Dune by Frank Herbert

Learned About

• Git and Github
• Code, The Hidden Language of Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold, chapters 1 - 15: Codes, binary, relays, logic gates, number systems and using logic gates for addition

Work

• Building automated test solutions for a Biotech client (gene sequencing) using Ranorex, C#, SQL and API requests.

Projects

• Longest walk: 8 KM
• Published this blog on GitHub
• Made tasty vegetable soup

Links

• ChatGPT

November 2022

Read

• We Don't Know Ourselves by Fintan O'Toole

Learned About

• Git and Github
• First few chapters of CompTIA A+ Certification

Projects

• Longest walk: 6 KM
• Built: Now Password - Simple Password Generator