Day 36-40: BOOT CAMP: End of the Road!

Well, today is the day. Day #40. It came way faster than I thought it would. 40 days seemed like a long time when I first set up the challenge, but it went like a rocket. I accomplished a lot, but I feel like I accomplished only a part of what I could have. Alas, "life is what happens when you are busy making other plans".


Today was my first day at SideReel, and as I've made the point before, I don't tattle on my companies or tell many specifics (I don't feel it's appropriate), but there's some amusing aspects of today that I can share. First and foremost, I came in all prepared to get an environment together with Ruby, Selenium, Cucumber, etc, and wow them with what I learned. As I got there and got situated, one of the founders handed me... an iPhone... and said "we need to test our newest app and make sure that we find any potential issues."


Heh  Heh Heh!!!!!!


Understand, I'm not laughing at the request. I'm laughing at the fact that the one thing they had me focus on today was 100% NOT part of my 40 day BOOT CAMP plan, so I had to just kinda' wing it (thank heavens for Exploratory Testing techniques), and thus I became a Mobile Application tester today :).


The environment here is different than anything I've worked with before. There are no cube walls, we all sit out in the open area and work together. Lots of collaboration, lots of pairing, including with me to see how I was doing and what I was uncovering, and a chance to familiarize myself with Atomic Object Basecamp and Pivotal Tracker... why yes, I have just dived head first into an Agile company! I think I'm going to need to reread Lisa and Janet's book book again, as I think now I can actually see a lot of what they were talking about now from a practical perspective, where before it was a "well, that would be cool someday". Someday is very much now (LOL!).


What's really fun is that I get to play with new environments. My "home system" is a Mac, which hasn't been a home base machine for me in almost a decade, so there's a lot I need to refresh and a lot I need to learn (but it felt very comforting to open up that terminal window and have access to a native UNIX system again :) ). Add to that the fact that I'll also be getting a Linux system to use for a lot of the testing and automation work I'll be doing, and yeah, I'm pretty excited about the new toys.


As I said on Friday, the work is often fun and energizing, but it's the people that make or break a gig. though it's only been one day, i can say that, thus far, the people are great, albeit quite a bit younger than me... I feared going in that I'd be the old sage, and that, it seems has proven to be true :). Ah well, someone has to be it, right? so to everyone that's followed this madcap and rapid based adventure, I hope that some of the things I've stumbled across have proven to be helpful to you as much as they have been to me. While the Boot Camp is now over, my Special Forces training is just beginning, and who knows how long that will take (don't worry, I'll spare you all my making another silly category to follow, and just report the findings I make as I make them, whatever timetable that works out to be).