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How-to guides, tooling tips and real-world advice for developers and product managers tired of broken software. Let’s fix this mess together.

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How-to guides, tooling tips and real-world advice for developers and product managers tired of broken software. Let’s fix this mess together.

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A practical guide to Firebase Emulator for local dev and Cypress testing

Setting up Firebase Emulator to work with local dev, Cypress, CI, and Claude Code—what works, what doesn’t, and edge cases to watch out for.

Robert Komaromi

Robert Komaromi

Software tooling & tips

A warm, sunlit desk is arranged with a closed laptop, notebook, headphones, coffee mug, open book, hiking map, plants, and a small Test Double-themed rubber duck. A large open space in the center of the desk symbolizes the breathing room created when technology helps people reclaim time for thinking, rest, and life beyond work.

AI Should Give Us Our Lives Back, Not Fill Them With More Work

River Lynn Bailey

River Lynn Bailey

Illustration of distributed process ownership: a person untangling a knotted ball of workflow threads into four clean, separate strands flowing to individual professionals working at desks, representing decentralized task management and team accountability

Distributed process ownership eliminates team bottlenecks

Sukhraj Singh

Communication & teams

Dark illustration showing a tangled gray scribble labeled "AI" resolving into a glowing green line that climbs upward through icons for code, systems, communication, and metrics before reaching a glowing star labeled "The Plot (Again): Meaning. Impact. Direction.

Software engineering and AI: Finding the plot(again)

River Lynn Bailey

River Lynn Bailey

Communication & teams

Double Takes

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Double Takes

TDDing with Claude is like having a pair that removes all the failing assertions every time you go to the bathroom.

Steve Jackson

State machines are the answer for those seeking determinism in the era of AI agents.

Dave Mosher

A Slack conversation left Doc reflecting on what bug bashes say about the systems we work in.

Doc Norton

Test-driven development is to programming what double-entry bookkeeping is to accounting.

Neal Lindsay

The fundamental character flaw of the software creator is not the misguided belief that they can solve any problem with software. Instead, it is the belief they can understand how their own software works before they create it.

Steve Jackson

We may need a SaaS appendix for Zawinski's law:

Any SaaS platform attempts to expand until it is a social network.

Matt Jones

An airy bridge with complex structural foundations deep in the ground

Why quality software is expensive (to build)

Quality software is expensive because the parts users notice least often require the most work: usability, reliability, security, compliance, testing, and long-term maintenance.

Shawn Rinehart

Maximize software investment

budgeting

efficient software

regulatory-compliance

security

software-purchase

Dominoes falling over in a pattern

AI amplifies everything (including what's broken). Start there.

Is your organization clear enough to benefit from the speed AI delivers? AI doesn't create dysfunction—it amplifies whatever patterns already exist, including the broken ones.

Jen Tedrow

ai-ml

leadership

strategy

teams

Agentic trainer Dave working on Ride with Dave

The moat is made of people

Foundation models are getting better and cheaper every quarter. Coding agents can replicate almost any app from a screenshot. So what's left to build a defensible product on?

ai-ml

dev-experience

efficient software

process

productivity

Work desk neatly arranged with architecture systems diagram showing stylized legacy hardware on one side and modern cloud systems on the other

How I'd start a legacy modernization project now

What leadership needs when they’re considering a legacy modernization initiative is a scored diagnosis: every finding rated on how bad it is and what kind of problem it is.

Mike Doel

Legacy modernization

legacy-modernization

ai-ml

assessments

efficient software

scaling-challenges

Product development when the rules keep changing, agentic trainer Dave working on Ride with Dave

Outputs are cheap. Being wrong isn't.

The cost of writing software has collapsed. The cost of writing the wrong software hasn't. When you can ship faster than you can plan, product development looks different and a different kind of partnership makes that sustainable.

Todd Kaufman

ai-ml

founders

greenfield-product-development

product-innovation

quality

Ride with Dave coding

What it takes to keep humans in the lead with AI

Teams actually shipping AI products build a system that keeps agents honest with humans in charge.

Dave Mosher

ai-ml

dev-experience

greenfield-product-development

product-innovation

devops

Flow from plan to review to build to investigate with Han plug-in

Introducing Han: A research, plan, and implement plugin, without the rails

There are a lot of good ways to bring research, planning, and implementation structure to AI coding tools. Han is built for people who would rather pick their own path than ride someone else's track.

River Lynn Bailey

River Lynn Bailey

ai-ml

dev-experience

open-source

An idea board overflowing with both new and old post its and papers

Product managers

Product managers

Product managers

Great company cultures hold people accountable

Principles without consequences are aspirations. Here's the framework for turning codified culture into real behavioral change.

Michael Toland

Product management

communication

culture

leadership

product-innovation

teams

You're N.E.A.T.!

Technology is a means to an end: answers to very human questions. We want to connect with other folks who share that belief.

Ways to connect

Test Double Executive Leadership Team

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