Me and my site

An intro to what this site is all about

Hi folks, I’m Mike and this is my site. Welcome! I am Senior Quality Assurance engineer. That is a job title that no-one ever understands. If you have heard of that role before then, you probably have the wrong idea of what I do. Let me explain.

What is Quality Assurance?

A long time ago, this role meant "tester". But software has become more and more complicated and the release cycle so rapid that it has became really important to automate testing. So a new role was created called, "Software Development Engineer in Test". People like the title, it sounds cool. But it’s not. People doing that role write automated test scripts and basically focus on writing code to test other code. Unfortunately, focus on writing test code tends to have a detrimental effect on thinking about the role of testing. That’s where modern Quality Assurance comes in. Instead of focusing on writing speciliased test code, I focus on the big picture. I make sure I understand the architecture that is being used to run software applications, to test applications, and to deploy applications. I understand the code, and it’s strengths and weaknesses. I consider what might go wrong in all these palces and I plan, advise, coach and code to reduce risk in the short and long term. Done well, it’s an incredibly complex role. Done poorly, it’s boring and ineffective. I love it.

My motivations for this site

I am used to working on the large enterprise scale, but, like most engineers, I also have the urge to create. So this site will serve as a place to do that; to experiment and document that process. I’m currently excited to try out what Nextjs and Vercel can do.

All the code for this site can be found on my Github account.