Don Johnson articles - 44 total
🧠 The Silence That Shipped Nothing: A Psychological Postmortem of My Fake Startup
"We replaced our workflows with Whispr. What we lost in productivity, we gained in existential...
When Swagger Lies: Fixing API Drift Before It Breaks You
Your Swagger spec says one thing. Your code says another. Jira has its own version of reality....
The Complexity Conundrum: How Overengineering Slows Your Startup’s Pivot 🚀
Introduction: When Code Becomes a Roadblock Imagine a startup codebase so tangled that...
Promptcraft: How to Talk to Robots (So They Don’t Make You a Sandwich When You Meant a Website)
We’ve entered a new age—an era where human language, once considered too imprecise to control logic...
The Overengineer’s Manifesto: Saying Hello the Hard Way
Project Complexity Score: 1,417 lines of code & docs, 264 function/class/logic blocks—just to...
Vibe Coding with Intent: A Tester’s Perspective
There’s a lot of noise right now around vibe coding. People are generating entire apps off vibes,...
Godfingering vs. Dogfooding: A Tale of Two Dev Cultures
"Works in Postman" is not a badge of honor. There are two kinds of engineering cultures: those who...
Using Grammatical Evolution to Discover Test Payloads: A New Frontier in API Testing
"What if your test cases evolved on their own, like digital bacteria, probing your API for...
Merge Me If You Can — The Art of the Pull Request Ego
“It’s not about catching bugs. It’s about catching egos slipping.” — Probably You Welcome to the...
Framework Famous, RFC Clueless: Why Developers Need to Dig Deeper
Developers today are geniuses—just ask them. They know every framework, every library, and every...
Operation Golden Arches: A Playful Hacker's Deep Dive into McDonald's Deal Exploits
So, last week, I was your run-of-the-mill researcher, sniffing out security flaws and generally...
The Art of Code: Rediscovering Creativity in Programming
In today's digital landscape, where software development often revolves around routine tasks and...
Your Code Lints Great, but Runs Like Garbage: The Curious Case of Misplaced Priorities in Software Development
In today's fast-paced software world, developers and teams often find themselves entranced by...
Code Less, Create More: How AI Freed Us from the Debugging Dungeon
Imagine a world where your code writes itself—almost. Gone are the days when we’d burn the midnight...
Assembly FTW: Why All Code Is Created Equal (But Assembly Is Still King)
Software development has had more glow-ups than your favorite influencer—from punch cards to...
Building a Distributed Microservice in Rust
Overview This project demonstrates how to split CPU-bound tasks (like prime factorization)...
Cryptocurrency Rug-Pull Scams: A Comprehensive Analysis
1. Technical Deep Dive How Rug-Pulls Occur Programmatically: Rug-pull scams typically...
Mastering Git Hooks: A Cheat Sheet for CI/CD Ninjas
Git hooks are like secret agents hidden in your repositories—quietly waiting to spring into action....
Hack & Test: Merging Mutation, Property, Hypothesis, and Chaos Testing in Penetration Testing
I've always believed that the best security testing isn’t about following a strict checklist—it’s...
From Code to Capital: The Hacker Mindset Revolutionizing Algorithmic Trading
Imagine a world where the elusive figure, once known only for breaching digital fortresses in dimly...
Evolution of MVP Development: From Early Best Practices to Modern Startups
Building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) quickly is a core startup strategy, but history shows that...
Correct by Construction: Building Software Right the First Time
Ever fix a bug at 2 AM and think, "There must be a better way to do this!"? If so, you're not alone....
High-Confidence Testing with Mutation Analysis and Diverse Test Data
Modern tech companies – especially in high-stakes domains like finance and healthcare – are embracing...
API Design‑First Companies: Strategies, Impact, and Financial Performance
API design‑first (or “API‑first”) companies prioritize designing their services as well-defined APIs...
Confidence Through Diversity: A Deep Meta-Analysis of Property Testing in DivvySim
Repository: divvysim Property testing has revolutionized my approach to quality assurance in...
Emotional Intelligence in Tech: The Most Important Code a Manager Can Write
In the high-stakes world of software engineering and technical teams, there’s a long-standing debate:...
Building Testable Websites: Empower Your Entire Organization
Imagine this scenario: A development team races to launch a new feature, only to discover that half...
A Bite-Sized Journey into Kafka, Arrow, and Go
CandyFlow isn’t an actual product—it’s a playful concept to showcase what happens when you combine...
Make Makefiles Great Again: Why It’s Time to Bring Back the OG Workflow Boss
Makefiles—the unsung heroes of development workflows. Conceived in 1976 by Stuart Feldman during his...
Why Clear and Meaningful Status Codes Matter in Your REST API
Picture this: It’s late at night, and a tester is running through a suite of automated checks when...