TL;DR

This post will try to help you in answering the question: “What can you do right now?” The post is based on a remarkable book written by Chad Fowler, The Passionate Programmer.

Parkinson’s law is the adage that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion” [Wikipedia].

Parkinson’s law is about bureaucracy. Working in Google at the beginning and now is very different. If you work in a “big” company, you know what I am applying to. Bureaucracy is in every step of your daily work. You dream about the small, capable team.

Your personal bureaucracy is procrastination. In your path to becoming a passionate software tester, you mastered something from A Tester’s Syllabus. But stop daydreaming and start to act. Here is how.

I used to be skeptic about hackathons. How to create an application in 24 hours when in a regular job we need months to have something functional? Then I tried my first hackathon.

The experience was very positive. It seems when you work under a tight schedule, you get things done. I was part of a small team with three excellent Ruby and Ruby on rails developers. Their investment was in that technology. I also knew Ruby and Ruby on rails, but nothing compared to their level. We agreed what next should be done in short discussions. The discussion also went in real-time. In the end, we had a functional application that was ready for production.

When you are under pressure, you get things done. Do a small experiment next weekend and test this heuristic.