Almost unbelievably, it’s now been a year since I left my long stint at Quest Software. It’s been a very different year for me than any of the previous 25-or-so spent in full-time employment in the IT industry. The continuing impact of COVID-19 on day-to-day life in my part of the world has also made for an unusual 12 months in many ways.
While I haven’t missed working at Quest as much as I expected, I’ve missed the people I had the chance to work with for so long in Melbourne and I’ve also missed my opportunities to spend time with the teams in China that I’d built up such a strong relationship with over the last few years (and who, sadly, have all since departed Quest as well as their operations there were closed down this year).
I’ve deliberately stayed fairly engaged with the testing community during this time, including giving a talk at at meetup, publishing my first testing book, launching my own testing consultancy business, and blogging regularly (including a ten-part blog series answering the most common search engine questions around testing).
Starting to work with my first clients in a consulting capacity is an interesting experience with a lot of learning opportunities. I plan to blog on some of my lessons learned from these early engagements later in the year.
Another fun and testing-related project kicked off in May, working with my good friends from the industry, Paul Seaman and Toby Thompson, to start The 3 Amigos of Testing podcast. We’ve always caught up regularly to chat about testing and life in general over a cold one or two, and this new podcast has given us plenty of opportunities to talk testing again, albeit virtually. A new episode of this podcast should drop very soon after this blog post.
On more personal notes, I’ve certainly been finding more time for myself since ending full-time employment. There are some non-negotiables, such as daily one-hour (or more) walks and meditation practice, and I’ve also been prioritizing bike riding and yoga practice. I’ve been reading a lot too – more than a book a week – on a wide variety of different topics. These valuable times away from technology are foundational in helping me to live with much more ease than in the past.
I’ve continued to do volunteer work with The Vegan Society (UK). I started off performing proofreading tasks and have also now joined their web volunteers’ team where I’ve been leading research projects on how to reduce the carbon footprint of the Society’s website and also to improve its accessibility. These web research projects have given me the welcome opportunity to learn about areas that I was not very familiar with before, the “green website” work being particularly interesting and it has inspired me to pursue other opportunities in this area (watch this space!). A massive proofreading task led to the recent publication of the awesome Planting Value in the Food System reports, with some deep research and great ideas for transitioning UK farming away from animal-based agriculture.
Looking to the rest of 2021, the only firm commitment I have in the testing space – outside of consulting work – is an in-person conference talk at Testing Talks 2021 in Melbourne. I’ll be continuing with my considerable volunteering commitment with the Vegan Society and I have a big Status Quo project in the works too! With little to no prospect of long-distance travel in Australia or overseas in this timeframe, we will enjoy short breaks locally between lockdowns and also press on with various renovation projects on our little beach house.
(Given the title of this blog, I can’t waste this opportunity to include a link to one of my favourite Status Quo songs, “A Year” – this powerful ballad morphs into a heavier piece towards the end, providing some light amongst the heaviness of its parent album, “Piledriver”. Enjoy!)
Rockin' and Testing All Over The World 