Even lovers need a holiday

It’s been a while! I last wrote just before I left 99x (a great place to work, give them a try), but to explain my absence I need to rewind 4-5 years further.

I shifted from Technical Writing to SQE in 2013 right after I got my bachelor's (The reasons for this shift are better covered in a future post). I walked through the doors of the company as a novice software quality engineer not knowing a defect from an error. It also didn’t help that the company was probably the techiest employer in the country.

WSO2 does open source B2B, so naturally, development was fast phased and at the cutting edge. The products were built and shipped fast using various reputable open-source components. The product line aimed to cater to all the needs an enterprise might possibly have as they moved along their digital transformation journeys. So, for a fresh off-the-mill engineer like I was at the time, it was a fat kid at the buffet kind of situation (Honestly, I’m not body shaming here. The phrase just felt right in the sentence).

The testing work my team did was mostly manual and on the fly. In hindsight, I can understand why. For such fast phased open-source development and for the business model employed by the company it just didn’t make sense to automate each and everything thing above the component layer before shipping or be uber methodical (bare in mind this was some time ago, things may have changed since I left). So, I walked out with great technical exposure (for a tester) but little exposure to general testing processes and test automation.

The next couple of years I spent polishing up my automation skills and landed a great job at Sysco LABS. The company is a favored employer in Sri Lanka and in my opinion, a great place to learn carry forward in demand SQE skills. This is what I did for the past 3 years. I humbly sharpened my core testing skills by learning and using them all on the job. I am very fortunate to have got the opportunity to cover the full QE stack at the company.

I am definitely a better SQE to have had the fast paced startup testing experience at WSO2 and the methodical process-oriented testing experience at Sysco LABS. 

Well, all of what I’ve written so far doesn’t really answer why I haven’t blogged for 5-6 years. Well, I was busy. I had a lot on my plate. Things to learn on the job, a kid to care for, to get in shape, and I somehow found the time to get my masters. Now that the master's is out of the way, and I’ve put some miles behind the job I should be able to push out a post every now and then. 

Next time with some real SQE stuff...