Testing & Movies & Stuff

Public Relations for Quality I haven't made very many posts this year, but I figure QUALITY over quantity is a good thing. It's what I do after all.  It's odd. First because - I had a lot of plans at the end of last year about how 2020 would roll out for me. Like everyone did. I had several conferences I was speaking at. Several articles and workshops planned. Several -- you get the point. The world changed, and I found myself at home, working, like a majority of people in Techland.  Not only that, but my job changed. Four times at Unity. Yeah *mentally checks count*. I was hired at Unity Technologies as a Quality Lead. When I went to Unity from Thought Works, I only had two other folks.  Then, at Unity, I became a QA Manager, hired more people. Then I was shifted to a consulting and coaching role for an experimental team called Quality Elevation (like that name? I like it a lot.). I had an SDET and a Tech Writer reporting to me and we worked with three teams to help them...

Management: Year One Series This is my Year One series on Management. It’s going to be ongoing, kinda like a serialized comic of sorts. I’ll tag these posts when I make them so, at some point, maybe someone who is also getting into a management role can see they are not alone. Batman wasn’t Batman in a day. Even he has a Year One, Two, and Three. I was recently in a diversity round table at work. We had discussions about how we could bring more diverse candidates into the company. The old reasons were brought out and I realized, maybe, because of the community I've been involved in, and the people I listen to that I need to say something about how you can bring in more diverse groups of people and build a culture of folks that use that diversity to their advantage. It's Not A Pipeline Problem First and FOREMOST - It's not the pipeline. Whether you run a business or a conference. It's not the pipeline. It's literally the lack of community engagement and trust-b...

This wasn't the blog post I was planning to write. I've been neck-deep into learning all-the-things about managing folks, hiring folks, training folks, and generally making myself better glue. My hope is that after I write this post, I can follow up on some of that as well. Since about October 2018, I've been doing a lot of soul searching, and evaluating skills, and trying to understand where my personal interests are and where my skills and talents are focused. Maybe it's a midlife crisis (though my therapist hesitates to call it that). I prefer to call it a midlife evaluation. We all take them from time to time. Some just for fun, and some as part of self-discovery. Personality evaluations, skill evaluations, mental health evaluations, physicals. Periodically, one or more of these turn up a few things we weren't aware of or didn't quite understand. For me, my career journey thus far has been one I'm very proud of and I have enjoyed (almost) every min...