Welcome to my blog

It has been many years since I have written a blog entry (July 14, 2011), six and a half years ago roughly. My last blog post was about putting out my first house fire. Back in the day I had a blog about Emergency Services and things that I had seen or experienced in the normal course of being a volunteer Paramedic and Fire Fighter in Maryland. I was about halfway through my stint as a test manager at Agora Publishing in Baltimore, MD, I had a wife and two kids with the third on the way.

Flash forward to today and I am in a different state, North Carolina to be exact, I no longer volunteer in Emergency Services, I have twice as many kids now and I am still employed managing software testers albeit for another company. I have learned a lot more about technology, testing, and people in the past six plus years.

I plan to use this blog to give me somewhere to write about my passion for testing, what I have learned in my career and to hopefully inspire others to pursue careers in testing. Along the way I hope to also pick other's brains and get answers to challenges and other things that will make me better at leadership or technical ability or at influencing others to support and promote healthy testing practices and culture.

I have so much to write about. The past five months at my job have been a whirlwind. Back in October I was asked to lead a "Quality Center of Excellence" initiative. My heart raced, my palms got sweaty and I was over excited about the opportunity. As I learned more about it the position was in addition to all my current responsibilities, and it came with no extra pay. This didn't discourage me though and I think that the senior leadership knew that and it was one of the reasons that I was selected.

Having worked there for almost four years in October they knew what I was capable of and the passion that I had for "testing things". The product that I worked on was considered very mature in process and ability to deliver on time, on budget and with an acceptable amount of quality. So naturally whatever I was doing should be able to be forklifted to all other business units in the company and we would see instant benefits right? Well at the beginning that was definitely their expectation, but I knew better. I had heard the horror stories from other business units and even had some first hand accounts from folks that I knew outside my group.

This is where my blog is going to focus, on the past five months and I hope to catch everyone up to current day, March 9, 2018 within the next few blog posts.