Conferences – again!

As I approach the half-century mark of existence, I’ve been reflecting on how I’ve ended up where I am…so excuse me while I ramble out loud. Seriously, how did a music major end up as a high level software engineer at a company like Microsoft? I have interviewed hundreds of people for Microsoft, who, on…

I’ve had a few conversations on twitter over the past few weeks about tester titles. My conclusion is that test titles are meaningless, but let’s look at why I think that, and why it doesn’t matter. Let’s say you’ve been testing for eight years, given a conference presentation or two and wrote a bit about…

Short story is that TestBash may be my new favorite testing conference. Great venue (no, fantastic venue), well-organized, and excellent variety and diversity across the different presentations. I was reflecting while walking the streets of Philadelphia this morning and realized that almost every talk was experiential – filled with stories of problem solving and discovery. For those who…

I had fun for a bit this week playing with keyvalues.com – you select the values you care about, and it tries to match you with a company. I haven’t called out a Jeff Nyman blog post in a while, but I enjoyed his article on shapes of tests Something important for the near future…

I was talking with a colleague of mine this morning about his role and what it meant, and I made a mental note to blog about some of my ideas. Given that my ability to remember anything peaks at about a day, I thought I better write it down now. I predict there will be…

I think a true passion for learning is one of the things that makes testers great. The best testers I know are always looking for concepts or viewpoints they haven’t heard before and looking for opportunities to learn anytime they can.But it’s usually not enough to just to want to learn – you need some…