Decompression – phase 2

It’s already four weeks since my exit from Quest after some 21 years with the company and it’s amazing how quickly my “reset” is happening.

My calendar continues to be largely empty, apart from a number of video calls with friends both locally and overseas each week. My days are passing quickly and are filled with exercise (walking and cycling), well-being practices (meditation and yoga), reading, home/garden maintenance and relaxing. The welcome start of the Tour de France and the excellent daily highlights on SBS represent my only “TV time” during the day.

I’ve also been keeping abreast of what’s going on in the testing community and have a couple of small projects on the go – writing a guest blog post (details coming soon) and preparing a talk (“Testing is not Dead”) for the DDD Nights meetup on 10th September.

When my redundancy package payout appeared in the bank at the end of August, my ties to Quest finally came to an end. Reflecting on such an incredibly long time working in the same company, my main emotion is one of gratitude. Quest provided me with my first employment opportunity in Australia after migrating from the UK and, over the many years that followed, gave me manifold opportunities to grow professionally, contribute to the broader testing community, travel extensively, and build great relationships. I miss the banter with my good friends & colleagues and also my close collaborations with the wonderful folks over in our office in China, where I look back with great pride on the development programmes I helped to put in place and run over the years.

I continue to work on the testing-related project I mentioned in my previous blog post and expect to make an announcement on that in the next month or so, so stay tuned! I’ve also been taking part in an online business course and this may also lead to some news in terms of my next steps in the coming months.