Top all-time · #6910
Mike Bland
Personal blog · mike-bland.comprogrammingwriting
Mike Bland's personal blog at mike-bland.com covers programming and writing. Since 2012, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Google's Testing Grouplet”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-11-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters cite Mike Bland's posts on Google's internal developer tooling history, including Blaze, fixit days, and small/medium/large test categories, as background for their own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The personal blog of Mike Bland, a programmer, amateur musician, and Instigator
Most-linked posts?
- Google's Testing Grouplet2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-10
What Hacker News says?
I work on developer infrastructure at Google. Opinions my own. I think it typically comes down to a few key leaders having the political capital/will to enforce policies like this. Google's `third_party` policies[0] were created relatively early on and were, as far as I understand, supported by high level technical leaders. The ROI of policies like these is not always immediately evident, so you need the faith of ke…
Comment linking /2011/09/27/testing-grouplet.html
on “Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Other Companies”Submitted About the 'Test Mercenaries' group at Google as a story · 6 points
HN discussionWe already have standards, one of which is clear technical documentation of the system, which the users were not getting. Also we have standards for writing fault tolerant systems (I would say even 2 measure devices are not enough, you need at least 3 to be able to decide). In Boeing it's clear that software best practices and standards were not followed at all. As an example here's the description of the Google Tes…
Comment linking /2011/10/18/test-certified.html
on “How the Boeing 737 Max disaster looks to a software Developer”Submitted Google's Testing Grouplet as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think what's missing from the tools discussion is the infrastructure that the tools sit on top of: 1) CitC (Client in the Cloud). Mounts your development environment on FUSE filesystems that exist in the cloud. The entire monorepo is mapped into your CitC directory. You can access it from your desktop shell, your home laptop, or a Web Browser based IDE. Any edits you make are overlaid onto the (readonly) source re…
Comment linking /2012/10/01/tools.html
on “An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools”Submitted Google's Test Mercenaries (2012) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFYI, this article describes how traditional Google fixit was conducted: https://mike-bland.com/2011/10/04/fixits.html
Comment linking /2011/10/04/fixits.html
on “We stopped roadmap work for a week and fixed bugs”Submitted Haters gonna Hate - calling BS on dismissal of automated dev testing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI remember reading blogs (and Testing on the Toilet) around 2010 about how Google divided tests into Small/Medium/Large, with specific definitions, rather than trying to use more vague and overloaded terminology that no one ever agreed on. Seems like they are no longer doing that? Too bad, since I think it was a clever trick to avoid having to get into pointless discussions about things like "what is a unit?". Havin…
Comment linking /2011/11/01/small-medium-large.html
on “Delete tests”Submitted The Rainbow of Death (2017) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionBlaze is very old (from 2006), the history is described here: https://mike-bland.com/2012/10/01/tools.html#blaze-forge-src... In the years that followed folks left Google and joined other companies and created similar build systems because blaze had a lot of advantages at scale. Facebook made Buck, Twitter made Pants. Blaze was still closed source inside Google. They all used the same python looking language. In 201…
Comment linking /2012/10/01/tools.html
on “Build faster with Buck2: Our open source build system”Submitted Call for OpenSSL Testing Help as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
