Look for an opportunity to be remarkable

Inspired by Srini Rao’s talk, Don’t Look for a Job: Look for An Opportunity to Be Remarkable, I reflected on the many opportunities to be remarkable. If you haven’t seen this video, I recommend you take a listen to what Srini says. His remarks are valid for both college students as well as seasoned professionals.

I’ve thought about ways I’ve tried to be remarkable in my own life, and what might apply for other situations as well.

Work life:

• Look for ways to stream line processes. Oftentimes, a certain process exists in a company, because “that’s the way we have always done this.” Be an innovator and a problem solver and look for ways to automate tasks, or cut out the fluff. I’m a software tester by profession, and I really try to automate 80% of my tasks. This lets me focus on the remaining 20%, which is usually the really hard stuff.
• Question whether you really need to be at that meeting. Unfortunately, some companies have many meetings, and there exists the culture of having pre-meeting meetings. If you don’t really think you need to be there, say so. Ask if you can just get the summary of decisions made. This way, you will have more time to...
• Focus on your most important project. If you don’t know what this is, ask your manager or boss. Find out what the most important thing is that you need to be working on today, and work on fulfilling that. When I arrive at work each morning, I ask myself this question. I periodically will discuss this with my manager to make sure that our goals are synchronized.

Now I realize that these tips are probably not what Srini had in mind. I assume that you already have a job, and are looking for ways to be remarkable there. I also believe that there are ways to be remarkable beyond the 9 to 5.


Life in general:

• Give your stuff away. This last weekend, I was gathering up our old baby gear, and was planning on taking it to a local resale shop to see if they needed any of it. Some things, like portacribs, are not accepted at Goodwill, so, I might as well try to make a buck if I can. I have also asked other expectant parents if they needed any of this, but hadn’t found a good home for everything. But, then my partner, D, asked an expectant co-worker if they needed anything. She said yes, and was so grateful for the offer. Her husband has been out of work, and they only had bought a crib. I feel so helpful that I can give them our old car seat/stroller combo, as you need a car seat to leave the hospital with your newborn.
• Invite people over. Whether for a meal, or to stay the night, people thrive on human interaction. Make memories for your family, and have a great time.
• Learn a foreign language. You will not only gain the ability to speak to more people on planet Earth, you will also expose yourself to new cultures and new ideas. And this makes it more fun to...
• Travel. Everyone loves to travel, right? The best way to do it, though, is to avoid packaged tours and cruises, and get into the daily lifestyle of your destination. This, again, expands your mind as you learn how other people live and think. You will find that this exposure will change you on the inside. After living in Germany for three months, I again yearn for another opportunity to submerse myself in another culture.

I’m sure there are lots of other ways to be remarkable in your life. I’ve only scratched the surface.

Today is a new day!

Yesterday, I was laid off from my job at Phurnace Software. It was a short but good run at that startup company. It was a bummer to be laid off for a second time in less than a year. I guess that is the economy these days.

But today, I have a renewed sense of hope that something good is on the horizon. I worked on my resume last night, and I'm ready to hit the pavement running. Thanks for the nice thoughts and wishes friends and family have already sent me via email, phone, and Facebook.

I love my iPod shuffle

Recently, at work, the development team received iPod shuffles for delivering our latest major release. I have been listening to mine a lot now, and I love it. I let iTunes autofill the iPod shuffle, and then I can rediscover old music in my library.

Some thoughts on designing a test framework with Ruby

Here are some of my thoughts after actively working on a test framework in Ruby and scripting and running test scripts for the last couple of months.

Start writing tests first, and then grow your framework. I tried to design a framework before I had a solid idea of what the testing needs were. I had just joined the company, and didn't really understand the use cases and test procedures very well. So, I just made assumptions of what I thought would be good common code and what should be in a "good" test framework. These assumptions came from other test frameworks I had used or designed in the past. I felt like my experience would make up for my lack of product knowledge. In a lot of cases that was true, but I could have delved more into the testing side, instead of just the framework. Sometimes to test something, you just need a very simple script, and a sophisticated framework can just get in the way.

Don't overdesign features before you really need them. For example, I'm thinking of ripping out the logging stuff I implemented, because now it is annoying me. I had designed the test framework so that when you include the test harness class in the test class, a log will be made for any test run. Well, I found out I wasn't really reading the logs too much, I was just relying on the output from Ruby's Test::Unit class. And I hadn't implemented a cleanup mechanism to clear the logs after a certain age was reached. So, I'm constantly typing "rm -f *.log". I think it is wiser to not force the logging in a test class, and have the test developer decide what logging is necessary and the mechanism to do that.

The DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) concept is great, but don't get too fancy, though, with code reuse and that magical metaprogramming (if you are using a dynamic language like Ruby, as I am). It probably doesn't matter much when you need to quickly crank out tests, since this is just testware, not shippable code. In most cases, I think repeating yourself a couple of times is okay, especially when you are trying to automate as much of your tests by the end of a sprint. But once you get to the magical number of 3, then you should think about your modularity and move your repeated code to a common library.

Don't get hung up about trying to implement tests in only one language. This is probably a good reason to not spend too much time working on a framework, because, you might need a different language or tool to perform a subset of your tests. For example, there are some things that Java is better at than Ruby and vice versa. When it comes to manipulating large amounts of XML, performance-wise, Java would be my choice over Ruby.

How to print to PDF on Windows for free

One of the nice things that Mac OS X has out of the box is support for PDF. You can easily print to PDF without any other software. Unfortunately, with Windows, that is not the case. There are commercial products available that allow you to print to PDF. But there is another way, a free way to do it. I set this up on my computer at work using the following tutorial: Creating a free PDFWriter using Ghostscript. The only thing that I did differently was to download and use HP's Universal Print Driver.

Dazel Dead 5/2008

Me and D at the Gingerman for Dazel Dead, May 2008. Taken by Bill.

More about MS Office 2007 files

Just a while back, I blogged about how to open MS Office 2007 files on a Windows machine even if you don't have MS Office installed. I've just stumbled upon a website that will convert the files for you. I haven't tried it out, but it appears that Zamzar converts MS Office 2007 files as well as does many other types of conversions. This might be useful to keep in mind if you are on a different operating system, like Mac OS X.

On the importance of blogging for technical folks

My second post for the Phurnace Software blog (which is why I didn't post last night....I was working!):

On the importance of blogging for technical folks

Congratulations, D!

She just accepted a new job at Compass Learning!

TestLink

I just started using TestLink at work. It's a software test case management (TCM) tool, something every QA team needs, in my humble opinion. We didn't have anything in place, so I researched and chose TestLink over a few other free/low cost solutions. It's not HP Quality Center, but so far it is getting the job done. I've only been using it for a few weeks now (we're in the middle of a sprint), so I'll give an update later, and a more thorough review of the tool.

How to open MS Office 2007 files on Windows without MS Office

I am currently using OpenOffice v. 2.4 at work, which doesn't support MS Office 2007 files. Sometimes I just need to read these files, and not really edit them. E.g., I will get a .docx or a .xlsx file from a colleague or vendor. Just yesterday I couldn't open a .docx file from our outsourced vendor. MS Office 2007 support won't arrive until OpenOffice.org 3.0 comes out (it's in beta testing right now). So my quick solution was to download the Microsoft Office Compatibility Pack for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint 2007 file formats and the Word Viewer. Together those allowed me to open the vendor's .docx document. Note that the Word Viewer 2003 plus SP3 update seems to work well too.

Book review: Testing Extreme Programming

Today my first Phurnace blog posting is up at:

Testing Extreme Programming

People I know in recent news

A couple of people I know have made appearances in the media.

First, today was my first day at my new job at Phurnace Software. And in today's Tech Monday section of the Austin American-Statesman was an article about Phurnace's venture backing and an interview with our CEO Larry Warnock. (I had a good first day at work, by the way.)

Second, a musician buddy of mine from my rock 'n' roll days, Neil Curran, was also in the American-Statesman a few days ago. This article was promoting his second appearance on TLC's Flip This House. I knew Neil back when he was in the Dead End Cruisers and I was in Stretford. I watched the special hour-long show, Flip This House: Diary of a Flip, last Saturday night, and it was pretty good. If you can catch a re-run, you should. Interesting side-note: Neil's new band, The Score, has 3 out of 4 Dead End Cruisers, and the fourth guy was the bass player from Stretford.

The job search is over

Today I accepted a position at Phurnace Software here in Austin. I'm excited to be starting there as a Senior QA Engineer in July. It was an interesting journey interviewing with various companies, but I'm grateful that the search has concluded. In the end, I had a tough choice to make between two companies, and that is not a bad dilemma to have.

5.958333333 years

That is how many years of service I have at Hewlett-Packard according to my severance letter I received a few days ago. For the most part, it was a good run. I learned a lot and have grown tremendously professionally. I cleaned out my cube last Friday, but it finally hit me last night. I think I had been so tired from job searching and interviewing, that I didn't feel it until later. A little bit of sadness. But I'm ready to move on, and am excited about taking a little vacation, and hopefully starting a new work adventure soon.