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At a conference a while back, I noticed a couple of speakers get such a confidence boost after solving a small technical glitch. We should probably make that a part of every talk. Have the mic not connect automatically, or an almost-complete puzzle on the stage that the speaker can finish, or have someone forget their badge and the speaker return it to them. Maybe the next time I, or a consenting teammate, have to give a presentation I’ll try to engineer such a situation. All conference talks should start with a small technical glitch that the speaker can easily solve was originally published by Ognjen Regoje at Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io on April 03, 2025.
I didn’t write much this year. The projects that I worked on (at work) used up most of my creative mental capacity leaving little for writing. The backlog is brimming, however. Targets for 2024 ❌ Publish at least 40 posts 11 ❌ Reach at least 200k readers Don’t have an accurate number ❌ Have at least 6 posts on the front page of something Probably would have met this if I had posted more – I had one successful post on Jan 14, which is encouraging ❌ Make at least $50 from writing. Nope, did no monetization whatsoever Breakdown Some stats: Number of posts: 11 Total word count: 3125 Longest post: When am I “allowed” to quit and not be labeled a quitter? (630) Shortest post: Speaking at Hasso-Plattner-Institut (0, because it’s just a link to a LinkedIn post) Breakdown by category: business: 1 startups: 1 ethics: 1 robots: 1 architecture: 1 interviewing: 1 productivity: 1 selenium: 1 doctolib: 1 No trend there. Feedly still reports 18 followers - no movement. But it also marked the blog as inactive which is a shame. Targets for 2025 I would like to commit to writing more in 2024, but I’m not very confident that I will have the time. Regardless, the 2024 goals were quite lofty but achievable so it makes sense to try them again Publish at least 36 posts (3 per month) Reach at least 200k readers (not sure how to track this accurately since I’m not keen to add analytics and GoAccess doesn’t seem to be super accurate) Have at least 6 posts gain traction (front page of HN, 10 reactions on LinkedIn, etc) A review of the blog in 2024 was originally published by Ognjen Regoje at Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io on January 01, 2025.
Here are a few things I’ve seen founders do that made me confident in their ability and dedication. Elevator pitch in LinkedIn tagline A founder who is all in is constantly selling. That means their tagline will: a) be for their company, not for them b) be the sales pitch, not a vague aspirational vision Value proposition keeps getting more specific If every time you talk to a founder and their value proposition is more and more specific to me indicates that they’re learning more and more about their USP, about their target customer, about the market. The opposite of this is a company that pivots every six months. No short stints in the CV Building a startup is decidedly a marathon. I think it takes about 4 years to make real progress in a startup. Folks who jump positions every year are chasing a career and are unlikely to want to slog through for such a long time. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just not the right profile. Worked at companies of different sizes A founder who’s seen multiple stages of a startup is more likely to be successful. While they might not have been in the top leadership positions they would have seen the challenges the organization faces, especially during the transitions. Worked in different industries, or not There is a difference between the technical and the business founders. The startups I’ve seen where the business founder was part of the industry for a while worked well. But I’ve also seen them get so focused on how things are that they can’t see how things should be. For technical founders, on the other hand, I think it’s a clear advantage to have been in different industries and seen different approaches. Switched to full-time as soon as possible It might be obvious but the sooner the founder goes full time the more skin in the game, but also belief in the business, they have. They’re that much more committed to it. The opposite of this is founders who are simultaneously CEOs of multiple companies. I don’t think that can ever work – least of all for startups. Don’t succumb to the hype The founders who aren’t always talking about how they’re going to incorporate the latest hype in their product seemed to get more accomplished. Founded, or was an early employee, of a startup that raised a round or two I think this is probably the biggest indicator. Having done the early stages, seed and maybe series A, eliminates A LOT of uncertainty. At least the company won’t fail because the founders aren’t competent at running a business, since they’ve done it before. I’d even be biased toward someone who did a startup over someone who’s been employed at a name-brand unicorn simply because the skill set is not at all equivalent. Green flags for investable founders was originally published by Ognjen Regoje at Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io on January 03, 2024.
2023 was a busy year so I did not spend a lot of time blogging, unfortunately. It was only in December that I had meaningful time for writing. In the 2022 review I set a few targets for the blog in 2023: Targets for 2023 ❎ Publish at least 40 posts 14 ✅ Reach at least 150k readers With a couple of viral posts this is very easily achievable. I’m at 180k even though I only had a few posts. I will include a target for the number of posts as well. ❎ Get at least 10 posts professionally? publicized I was thinking of hiring someone to help me distribute the content, but a) I didn’t produce much of it and b) I didn’t hire anyone. ❎ Build an audience (recurring readers, Twitter, newsletter?) Did not do this at all. ❎ Publish something on at least two other sites Did not do this. And I think I will not focus on this going forward. Quantity I published 14 posts, totaling approximately 9700 words. The average blog post length is 695 words. Working on legacy code is the longest post at ~729 words, followed by Lie still in bed with 679. The sample size isn’t sufficient to comment on whether the average length is adequate. Popularity Lie still in bed was the most popular substantial article. That’s encouraging because it’s not about tech, it’s just generic advice. MIT No AI was fairly popular but got flagged on HackerNews which killed it. It was also very quick to write. Interestingly Reddit’s disrespectful design and Big tech should help tackle misinformation on smaller platforms made a comeback. I don’t have detailed tracking anymore, it’s all based on server logs, so I can’t dig deeper into where the traffic is coming from. Editing the source markdown of a generated static site in the browser had some traffic as well which is interesting. It’s probably the most interesting post I wrote in a long while. Feedly reports 18 followers. Up three. What I’ve learnt I think I got better at writing more clearly. I’m more comfortable, at least at the moment, with publishing posts and not worrying too much about whether they’re perfect. I think that’s at least partly because I wrote so many posts in December. I made one pass with the rough draft. Then another pass that finalized the content. Then a final one where I didn’t change the content but just proofread and ensured clarity. Then I published the post. I took to heart the 2022 objective to frame posts positively more positively and have done that for several of them. Targets for 2024 Publish at least 40 posts Reach at least 200k readers Have at least 6 posts on the front page of something Make at least $50 from writing. I’m not sure if this is a good objective but maybe it might motivate me to think of monetization alternatives. A review of the blog in 2023 was originally published by Ognjen Regoje at Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io on January 01, 2024.
As much as working remotely is a competitive hiring advantage again, not wanting to work remotely is now an advantage for getting hired. A lot of companies are mandating returns to the office. Many more are scrapping fully remote positions, with some even rescinding fully-remote offers. So, for better or worse, not wanting to work remotely is now a competitive advantage. If that’s not one of your requirements you’re likely to pick up more offers. Not wanting to work remotely is now a competitive advantage was originally published by Ognjen Regoje at Ognjen Regoje • ognjen.io on October 15, 2023.
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This post was previously published through my newsletter on November 9, 2026. From time to time, I will republish newsletter issues on my blog here if I think people (and search engines) might benefit from it. If you want to read everything I’ve written once it is posted, I recommend signing up for the newsletter. If you’re doing anything to stay on top of what is happening in the world of software testing and test automation, like browsing or even posting on LinkedIn, which I stopped doing for the foreseeable future, or reading blog posts - my preferred way of keeping up these days, and I highly recommend Dawid Dylowicz’s excellent Software Testing Weekly aggregator mailing list if you prefer longer-form reading, too you’d be thinking that AI has consumed our entire field, and that everybody (or at least those who post or write in public) is an AI expert these days. The reality, though, is far from that. Yes, some people use a lot of AI, even when I would only call a small fraction of them ‘experts’. I definitely do not classify myself as an ‘AI expert’, by the way. A much larger group uses AI on a less frequent basis, and they’re getting some value out of it. Sometimes more, sometimes less. That’s the group I’m probably in. And then there’s a group of people who haven’t really been using a lot of AI at all so far, beyond maybe the odd prompt to ChatGPT or Claude. I don’t have the actual numbers, but I suspect that this group is a lot larger than you would think from browsing your feed or surfing the blogosphere. You just don’t see them, because they’re typically not the people who do a lot of work in public. A few weeks ago, I started working with a small group of testers to teach them how to use AI in their daily work. This work covers both test automation as well as broader software testing tasks, as some of them contribute to automation on a daily basis, but not all of them do. I’m working with them one day per week, on average, for three months, and we’re making small steps towards making AI a more prominent tool in their tool belt. So, what are we working on right now? I’m pulling ideas from my ‘Valuable Feedback, Fast with AI’ course, and so far, we’ve spent some time setting up Claude, going over some important concepts such as context windows, models, tokens, and (of course!) the probabilistic nature of LLMs, and what that means for the results they provide. We have gone through several initial conversations, using Claude to learn more about and review specific user stories, which was an excellent segue into using talking about MCPs and setting up a connection to both Jira and Confluence using the Atlassian MCP. Last week, we also started experimenting with writing straightforward skills to make it easier for Claude to repeat certain actions in a structured way. These actions ranged from reviewing stories and acceptance criteria to refactoring small chunks of code in their (Robot Framework-based) test automation suite. What I loved about this is the avalanche of ideas that popped up in their heads when they saw how easy it was to use Claude. We made a short to-do list of ideas to try out for the next couple of weeks, and I’m looking forward to seeing them getting more confident around using Claude. One thing I have noticed is that their level of comfort around using AI varies quite a bit. Some of them are naturally quite cautious, which means they’ll ask ‘can we really do this?’ and ‘should we really do this?’ frequently before even submitting a single prompt. This is a good habit, I think, but we’ll have to do some work to get them more comfortable with using LLMs, without losing too much of that caution. Others in the group are the opposite: I need to hold them back a little, because otherwise they’ll create a beautiful mess within days, simply because they see so many opportunities to use Claude in their work. That, too, isn’t inherently bad, but I do want to teach them not just how to get the most out of an LLM, but also (more so) how to use AI prudently. Over the next couple of months, we’ll dive deeper into writing better prompts, creating and structuring skills, better context management, and creating and using agents, and probably a few more things, too. I’m looking forward to seeing these people grow more comfortable around using AI in their daily work, and figuring out where AI genuinely adds value and where it doesn’t in their own context. Is there a deeper message in this newsletter? Maybe not, and I’m just happy to tell you about this project, and how it is a great example of a what I call ‘corporate mentoring’, a very efficient way of teaching a small group of engineers new skills, within their own context. But maybe it’s also to show you that, despite what you might see on the Internet, especially those places featuring a lot of self-congratulation (I’m looking at you, LinkedIn), not everybody out there is an AI expert. At least not yet. So, if you feel like you’re ‘behind’ simply because you’re not running at least 17 agents continuously, creating 5400 merge requests per day, know that you’re not alone. Quite far from it, I would say.
The economics of software engineering have fundamentally changed.
How effect handlers removed control-flow plumbing from query-json
An introduction to ZKeys: a new service that stores encryption keys off-site and automatically locks access to them if the client machines go offline for a long period of time.
