Technology

Aaron

BrowserStack Icons of Quality Q&A

I was nominated for the BrowserStack Icons of Quality, and they interviewed me, and to my surprise, they published it (with a few edits):

See the highlights on LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/p/gBgksTnZ


Or read the published interview on BrowserStack: https://www.browserstack.com/blog/honoring-iconsofquality-aaron-evans-one-shore/

Here is my full original answers:

  1. What are the most exciting aspects of your role as a Test Automation Strategist at OneShore?

I’d say the most exciting aspect of my job is the opportunity to work on many different projects, with different technologies. I love to learn. And meeting lots of new people and seeing their different perspectives on (among other things) testing.

  1. What’s a testing trend/innovation that’s got you excited these days?

I think the ability of LLMs — as a better search engine with working code examples — is really cool. Again, I love learning, and the ability to be more confident delving into a new codebase and exploring things outside of my domain expertise is fun and not nearly as much of a time sink. (I’m easily distracted.)

Also, seeing how other testers are leveraging LLMs to improve their skills, level up with better coding patterns, and tackle things that only senior engineers could do in the past is great. When I see someone write better API tests, or build continuous delivery workflows for test automation who might have been intimidated by such tasks a couple years ago, it makes me excited.

  1. What’s your hot take on AI in testing?

I used to be pretty down on AI. I still think there’s way too much hype. And I can’t stand using agents for coding (like Cursor, Copilot, or Claude code. But part of that is because I’m experienced and opinionated. I might not remember a function name or argument order, so an autocomplete/intellisense/LSP is handy, and all I need most of the time. But when you can’t see your code to edit it yourself it drives me mad. I totally understand why people vibe code (hands off) with an LLM — because you can’t really go half way. It’s either accept everything it slops out, or nothing.

Maybe there’s a future where you turn on the LLM to churn out boilerplate and then turn it off to get real work done.

But for me, the value is really in the power of searching with context and restructuring. At least half of that might be just because advertizing driven SEO has shittified the normal search vector. I remember being amazed by Google and then Stack Overflow in the past too.

But the real hot take now is that I don’t think AI will damage junior coders. I think it’s a huge multiplier for anyone worth their salt — that is people able to research and think for themselves. But the number of people who behave like energy efficient, slower LLMs is too high. That’s my pessimism, my misanthropy showing.

  1. What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone just starting their career in testing?

Find a mentor, but don’t be a follower. Explore new ideas on your own. Make mistakes, create ugly code, develop bad patterns. But refactor, iterate, learn from that. The hardest thing in technology these days is that there are so many establish, entrenched patterns, frameworks, processes — that are so stupifyingly bad — that it’s hard to see the good intentions in them, or see past the bloat for the value.

When you come up with an idea on your own, and realize it’s trash (maybe by seeing a better version), it’s a golden opportunity to learn and course correct — with wisdom instead of blind obedience. But when you see your unique idea validated, confirmed, or reinvented (before or after you) it’s golden. And gives you the confidence to not just hope for something better, but see the potential of being able to make the improvement.

The best thing you can do nowadays is try to understand the intent of some hopeless broken process or overly complex framework and show others how it can be simplified. You’ll probably be ignored — at least for now, but keep at it.

  1. How do you keep up with all the new trends and tools in software testing?

I just sit back on my porch and yell at all the kids to get off my lawn. And shake my stick at everyone and talk about how hard we had it back in my day, uphill both ways.

Seriously, I investigate trends and tools that interest me, and don’t worry about the rest. With experience comes understanding that you don’t have to be expert in everything, and trying to be can stretch you too thin — or wear you out. Be exceptional at one thing or pretty good at two or three things and be willing to adapt when forced. But don’t always feel like you have to bend to the latest fashion.

For example, if you know Selenium well, you don’t have to learn Playwright, or Cypress, or whatever comes next. There are still plenty of jobs that need Selenium skills. If the job you have declares you have to change, you can learn it if you want — or move on. I know that’s easy to say when you’re old and stubborn, but it applies the other way too. If you’re passionate about a new tool or trend — go ahead and jump in. Cool, now you know two tools, and your perspective is enhanced by knowing the differences and similarities between the old and new.

For me, learning about what’s outside of testing is more exciting these days. I’ve worked with so many different languages, platforms, tools, frameworks, etc. that one more isn’t a big deal. But getting better at devops or platform engineering, or trying to understand what makes sales guys and girls tick, or how scrum masters sleep at night without nightmares of jira, or even experiencing what it’s like to twist your mind in a knot developing a React app. If nothing else, it gives you empathy for people who have different problems in life.

  1. What are the things you wish you knew about software testing when you started your career?

I wish I knew how typecasting it was to accept a job in testing. When I started testing nobody — I mean no one had even heard of software testing — except maybe Cem Kaner. Sometimes I feel like Mark Hammill. For those of you under 50, that’s Luke Skywalker. He was so typecast that he never got another job, except in a horrible D-rate horror movie called “Guyver”. But he learned to become happy as a voice actor. Even poor Alec Guinness (O.B. 1 Kenobi) who was a prestigeous Shakespearean actor and had won an Oscar never got past it — but he rolled with the punches and went to conventions and shook hands with Star Wars fans (and laughed all the way to the bank — he made a fortune getting 2.5% of Star Wars gross profits.)

I’ve been lucky and learned to embrace testing, but only after literally running away to a remote island to get away from it. And now I get to speak at testing conferences and was honored to be asked to give these rambling answers.

  1. Outside of the tech world, what’s a hobby or activity you’re really passionate about?

I used to have hobbies and passions, but I’ve really mellowed out and given up on my dreams. I wanted to be a rockstar or an author or a painter or an extreme sports athlete (surfing, snowboarding, etc) and then I wanted to build a big successful company, but now I just want to water my garden, walk in the woods, and watch my kids grow up and see their dreams crushed too.

Here’s hoping you all can find contentment in the small things in life too.

Aaron

Bitcoin doesn’t work – and what can we do about it?

Bitcoin doesn’t work.

Two problems:

  1. Technical – Blockchain doesn’t scale.
  2. Social – Why should Bitcoin believers (and speculators) profit at the cost of everyone else.

If Bitcoin was the solution then there would be no need of the FOMO. Everyone could adopt it when it is stable. But nobody interested in Bitcoin wants it to stabilize — because they wouldn’t profit.

And alternatives — from Etherium to everything else — show both these flaws in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin forks try to address issues with Bitcoin but primarily want to to a piece of the pie. And other crypto currencies do the same even though there are interesting diverse ideas being tried like proof of stake, blockchain contracts, non-fungible tokens, and many others I’m sure I’m not even aware of.

Lighting network seeks to offload the technical limitation but at the cost of losing the blockchain and its guarantee of trust.

But even though there are technical improvements and social innovations in the crypto / blockchain space — I’m not sure what to call it because neither term is exclusive or all encompassing — both the ultimate technical limit and unavoidable social problem remain.

The two challenges are:

Greed
Trust
Because of greed there is either a proliferation (and thus devaluation) of coins and networks.And because of lack of trust, no one network can be relied on implicitly.

Bitcoin was created to combat both the greed engendered by the corrupt legacy monetary system and the lack of trust engendered by that greed.

But as I said in my opening statement. It failed to address both. Blockchain and cryptography are used to eliminate the need for explicit trust but the way Bitcoin proposes to do so is with an infinite ledger — that you can’t read.

Bitcoin’s proof of work was primarily meant as a way to give the profit to the technical class — and it did so very well at first, but it turns out that like PCs and Windows, once someone figures out how to sell a computer with software to someone else, it doesn’t take a technical person to use it.

Bitcoin miners are primarily not technical people. No more so than the average PC gamer. Their grasp of the technical aspects of blockchain is very limited. And their understanding of the social and economic aspects is non-existent. And of course, they’ve primarily cashed out to institutional investors looking for a way to expand inflation. Or they are hodling small stakes.

Privacy is non-existent

I, as a Bitcoin user, have zero visibility into transactions, but large organizations (and governments) can track your every purchase and paper trail — in a way they could never dream about with paper money.

Security is no better than physical assets.

As has been shown in several non-hypothetical scenarios, all it takes for a thief to get your bitcoin is to point a gun at your head, and then it becomes his — irreversible, and (nominally) un-trackable. And exchanges are as open to hacking and corruption as banks — perhaps more so, because the government won’t step in an defend an independent exchange or punish an offender. The mainstream financial system has the benefit of being defended by the mainstream legal system. And lastly, that same mainstream system can do the same thing as the thief, but more elegantly, and take your bitcoin from you.

But, it was a good idea. Just flawed. There are lots of good engineering ideas that have come from perpetual motion pipe-dreams, and Bitcoin suffers the same type of flaws — however much you try to reduce friction (in a mechanical, or financial system) you still need to have inputs — and you will still, inevitably have outputs.

You can’t dismiss the laws of nature any more than you can dismiss the laws of human nature.

What you still need in a financial system is trust — trust in transactions, in contracts, and in the institutions that enforce them. And you can have that, just not with a technical solution.

But here’s how you get trust — you earn it.

Once upon a time, banks and governments earned trust. You put your money in the bank, and you got it back out when you asked for it. The money was verified to be real and not depreciated. And the government enforced laws and punished criminals. And did not inflate the money supply. To some reasonable degree — no system is perfect. And you can’t replace a good system with a perfect one, only a with a bad one.

When the American monetary system (and the English before it) decided (reasonably) that inflation was bad, they tried to stop it. Only to learn that when the monetary supply doesn’t increase — but production of real value does, that deflation happens — in other words, money becomes more valuable. And those who have more of it become proportionally richer than those who have less of it. Folks like Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton saw the problem with this — the rich got richer — and kept a hold of their money because merely hodling it increased their wealth proportionally.

But the opposite, monetary creation, means that holding onto money has negative value — it decreases in value because it is diluted by the inflation of currency. So the wealthy are encouraged to invest it — and their investment in real properties (and imaginary ones like stocks) goes up in value by the very expansion of money.

So it looks like a win-win (or lose-lose, depending on which end of the stick you get), but the idea was that a modest inflation that tracks real growth reduces (but does not really eliminate) the disparities. And based on the growth of the past couple centuries, I’d say that was right — or at least it wasn’t as bad as the alternatives.

I don’t think the growth of the past couple centuries was founded — or even primarily based upon — liberal monetary policy, rather that the policy of modest inflation was possible because of the two factors that are cropping up as issues in Bitcoin: greed and trust.

Or rather, honesty and integrity. Because you could trust your bank and government not to be too bad — and because you could trust your neighbor, or customer, or employer, to fulfill their contracts, the existing monetary system allowed for fluidity and growth.

It doesn’t anymore. And it’s not the systems that are broken, it’s the people.

So what do you do in a broken system, or in a system full of (or infiltrated by) greedy and dishonest people?

You work with honest people.

But how do you do that — how can you trust people? How can you build a system of trust?

A-ha! That’s where encryption, digital signatures, and public ledgers can come in.

That’s all really Bitcoin is — it’s a digitally signed ledger, with a encrypted hash (block) of transactional history (chain). Well, that and a few gimmicks. Like the proof-of-work for mining (which provided an incentive for people to enter the system) and the limited supply (to combat runaway inflation).

These actually worked to encourage adoption, but as I argued (incompletely) above, their are both social and technical problems that are perhaps insurmountable. And there is also the economic problem of potential deflation which results in speculators and hodlers.

And finally, there is the inflation cycle of infinite alt-coins much like the government backed banking system of infinite debt.

Again, what can you do to solve all this?

You can build a network of trust by honoring transactions, not debasing your monetary system, and providing transparency. Independent banks did this by printing their own currencies — or receipts, really — and by building trust between each other — exchanges, and clearinghouses — and governments enforced contracts and punished thievery.

So, we can scrap the blockchain, the proof of work, the hocus-pocus, and the competition by providing real value — a safe, secure, transparent transaction system, and clearinghouse between competing systems.

There is an economy of scale challenge here. It does take millions to develop, and billions to promote. Maybe a bitcoin-like land grab is actually essential to get it off the ground. And it does take an open, benevolent government to both allow such a system to exist, and to enforce it’s contracts. Maybe that is insurmountable too with governments and banks in each others’ pockets.

But we don’t have to fall back to a barter system or wagons full of gold and silver coins and armed guards to deter robbers. We can use cryptographically signed receipts and public ledgers to transfer money and reconcile between competing systems — the competition between systems will build trust. Those who provide the service we need — transactions we can trust — will get our business.

There’s one more challenge — other than needing people and institutions to become honest and benevolent (not greedy) — and that is the tendency towards monopoly. If one system of exchange becomes more efficient, has more integrity, and hence gains more market share, and thus power, it will tend to corrupt.

But it’s a workable system, and it looks like it only needs a revolution every hundred years or so.