Author: Phuong.Chu

I raised a real problem with our CTO and waited for him to fix it. Instead he asked what I would do. It annoyed me at first, until I remembered something a former boss once said.

A conversation with a Swedish colleague made me notice a quiet gap in how I was taught to work: do the task well, but leave the deciding to someone else. Where does that reflex come from, and what if the deciding was mine to do all along?

I walked into testing believing it would make me sharper, stricter, harder to please. Years later, I realized the craft had done the opposite—it made me softer, and my life got better for it.

At work I blame the company for nothing getting owned. At home I blame my son for the same thing. Two complaints, the exact same shape — and both of them let me off the hook.

It was December 27, 2024 — the first time I ever used ChatGPT. At that time, I was going through a rather dark period. My mood was low, and many things in life weren’t going the way I had hoped. Then, unexpectedly, something shifted. In the middle of those ordinary chat interactions with ChatGPT, I…

In my earlier post, “Choosing Focus in the Age of Overload,” I talked about cutting the noise and focusing on ourselves. After practicing that idea for a while, I discovered something even more meaningful: I slowly began to feel the beat of life. In a world that is constantly noisy—flooded with information and endless consumption—our…

Execution Without Direction Here’s something I didn’t understand for a long time:I was strong at execution, but weak at direction. For years, I didn’t recognize this as an imbalance. I was doing management well—without noticing the absence of leadership. Growing Up Inside Structure Looking back, I can see why I felt lost at certain points…

In many software companies, the QA structure looks something like this: On paper, this sounds efficient: “Let the manual testers think about test coverage, and let the automation engineers handle the tooling and coding.” In practice, this model often creates invisible gaps that directly hurt product quality. I’ve worked inside this structure, and I’ve grown…

In today’s hyper-connected world, I once found myself drowning in information. News from everywhere — online articles, Facebook, endless short videos, reels, TikTok, even group chats on Zalo — kept pouring in nonstop. Most of that information added no real value to my life. Worse, it drained my time, affected my mood, and sometimes even…

In today’s software industry, the pressure to deliver features faster—without compromising quality—is higher than ever. As teams transition toward Agile and DevOps models, automation testing has become essential. Companies are investing heavily in automated testing pipelines, while the scope of manual testing is shrinking and is increasingly reserved for areas that automation cannot yet cover.…