A New Leaf

A common question that people always ask me is "What do you do for work?" I respond, "Good question! It's hard to explain". Since I haven't had inspiration to write about my life in general because there just doesn't seem to be the right moment to want to sit down and write about it, i've decided to try and use this blog to reflect on my career and a bit on life.

When someone asks, "What have you been up to lately?" How do you respond? "The usual, work, sleep, eat". I don't mean to brag, but that isn't how I would respond. Last weekend I played poker, lost $25 in 3 games, went to an art exhibit on Saturday with my girlfriend, watched the Canucks beat some shitty team Saturday night with a few friends then went snowmobiling all day Sunday until I couldn't life another snowmobile out of a trench if my life depended on it. That is just a normal weekend though, so it's the same old. Soon, i'll be motorbiking in the fresh mud from the winter, fishing for ever so hungry gigantic rainbow trout on the recently thawed lakes, and jumping off cliffs on my downhill mountain bike. But, that's it. The majority of my time, I spend at work, like everyone else in the world.

From 11 winter

So, "What do you do for work?"
My official title is Software Quality Assurance Engineer Lead. I am working for a company which develops both software to display a simple easy to use Network report for small and medium size business's and also develops code that is able to detect the exact traffic flowing on your business's network such as Facebook, Streaming video, and more importantly...business applications such as Citrix, Microsoft Services, etc. My position is more on the reporting side of the business than the network detecting side. My responsibility is quite simple. Test the software for normal and abnormal user interaction, long term stability and performance increase or decreases. For example, if you've ever wondered why certain things that you want to do while working with your favourite photo editing software are hard to do and hard to remember how to do, it's because I'm not working for them helping them with the decision on where to put the buttons and how certain things are easily usable or not. My day to day job consists of installing new software releases from the development side, testing new features added to the release, logging bugs, and setting up situations to create failures, errors and odd behavior in the software. This is where, depending on who you are, it gets interesting or down right boring.

As I get closer to 4 years of Software Testing experience, it has been dawning on me that there are a lot of processes and methods that can allow my job and the whole software release cycle to be more efficient. From here on in, my blog may be a bit more about that since that is more of what i'm researching and trying to help produce methods and processes that work for my projects. Of course, i'll still mention stuff like how much powder I was diving into on my sled last weekend and show a couple pictures.