Blogs

Yes the title of this post doesn’t hide that I’m about to dive into a short story of some sort… and yes as a child I tended to take my Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein tales with much seriousness. These last few months I’ve been struggling for excitement and passion at work. I came to several realizations, some not so pretty about why I felt stuck. In the interest of not spilling tea about my soon-to-be previous employer, I’ll simply say the goals of the organization and mine diverged (Shifting Sands) and have continued to follow different paths. There were of course many good experiences, I just realized my time to leave had come. ...

Lately I’ve been fielding this question quite a bit at work and frankly its getting a bit exhausting to answer. I’ve become the automated test czar and thus all support, maintenance, and failings of our currently frameworks, harnesses, and tools are filtered in my direction. OK, I’m joking a bit here but at times I can feel the burning stare of colleagues eyes when they’re talking about the state of testing and the quality issues that nip us from time to time. You may be on the other side of the boat, but when theres a leak on my side don’t forget we’re still in the same boat together. ...

I just returned from a great trip to Hyderabad, India for this year’s Google Test Automation Conference. An inspiring trip where I spent several days getting test-geek on with a room full of other very passionate testers. It will be interesting wot where I can apply the tools and methodologies that I learned about at the conference to the print-workflow industry. More joyously, I’m looking forward to the collaboration opportunities with my new cross-continent contacts. ...

I thought this would be an interesting share, this hasn’t happened to me before. A few days ago I received a recruitment email from a local recruiter who found me on LinkedIn. I figured it couldn’t hurt to see where the exchange might lead. I’m always curious to learn what’s happening in other parts of our industry. I’ve learned that often times you can distinguish what values are implicitly expressed and valued by an interviewers questions. You can also learn a lot by what is not asked in an interview. ...

This post is really an effort to comfort myself after experiencing something of a late night conniption fit while on a business trip. The goals of the trip were many but my role was simple, assist our Solution Architect in un-buggering a few problems at a client site in North Carolina. The buggering I’m referring to was frustrating bad performance of our product. Our product is an enterprise web-based solution for solving complex print workflows. Due to the sensitivity of the data, our product is run on-prem by our customers, and air-gapped from other networks. Ever wonder how your bank statements, cell phone bills, or even your IRS statements are printed, stuffed, mailed, and tracked? We’ll those are the sorts of strangely exciting problems we work with. I’m not being facetious here… this can be some seriously honest-fun. ...