Blogger's Remorse

I really need to hold off posting at night. Even though it I spend a few days to a few weeks putting together my posts, I have them proof-read at least once and use a spellchecker, the tone of my posts is never the same after the fact.

I had to fix a few up from last night including renaming one post.

Blogging, like software development is a process of continual learning and evolution for me. I'm not where where I want to be regarding style, tone, spelling mistakes, but I am aware of where I am now and where I want to be. You can't get somewhere if you don't know where you are now.


I'll always leave my old posts up here because when I do achieve a writing style that I am happy with I can see how far I've come. I am starting to do this with defects as well. It would be nice to know how many defects I've caused in every application I've written since I first coded some basic in a Commodore 64. The type, cause, severity, etc, would also be useful to clear up the reporting. This way I could tell if my coding practices are improving.

I know TFS is starting to include this type of reporting through its Data Mining capabilities and testing tools like Quality Center also provide lots of reporting. If I can get a open-source setup working that I am happy with I'll post it here.

Without getting off topic too much more, let me wrap-up. Blogging is an evolutionary process where you get better by working on your craft. Just like software development. This is why my post here about analysing how you work to improve processes and therefore improve quality is just as relevant to blogging as it is to software development. Within a few weeks I should know whether just delaying a post until the next day when I can read it again will reduce the number of grammatical offences as well as improving the overall tone of each post.


p.s. Yes, I love statistics. I once had a spreadsheet that tracked the hours I slept, how I felt (subjectively of course), hours worked on various projects, productivity on each project and number of cups of coffee/water/tea I consumed per day in an effort to identify any correlations between them. Turns out sleep had the biggest factor on how I felt which directly translated into productivity.
p.p.s I'm not actually that remorseful over the posts, I just wish I had the ability to write with clarity on the day, not on the day after. Also RSS feeds don't reflect changes.

Who says you can't have good cheap fun?

My brother told me a story that I feel is worth sharing. The other day he joined a free online poker tournament with several thousand other people and came somewhere in the 40's. His prize winnings, a meager 26 cents of online money to use at the online casino. He took his winnings to the blackjack table and played 10c hands until he had a dollar. At this point he joined another poker tournament that had an entry fee of $1.

He got knocked out about 8 positions from making his dollar back. This entire process took about 5 hours to complete. It just goes to show that you can still have good cheap fun these days.

1st!

Hello and welcome.

Before we begin I'll briefly explain a little bit about who I am. As the title suggests by day I am a senior tester with an undisclosed organisation. By night I'm the lead developer with my company ICNH Games (www.icnh-games.com). Two full time jobs is hardly ideal but job A funds job B with the long term goal of job B (or ICNH Games as some call it) being self sufficient.

So in reality, I'm probably more developer than tester but, I am senior member in a medium sized testing team so many of my day to day decisions impact non-technical testers. This places me a in an interesting position especially as organisations (including ours) move towards distributed Service Oriented Architectures. This is also something I will be blogging about in the immediate future. However, I'll leave that for an actual post.

I won't promise to write frequently or blog for the sake of blogging. More realistically I'll blog when I have the time and when have something worthy of note ...I could be lying about its worth :) ... or when I have unanswered questions.

Feel free to add a comment or engage me on topic but please try to keep the spam-advertising to a minimum.