1) Adding a vote for any more info about how you're using AIs to help with writing and daily life.
2) What's your typical day in life (or not so typical) ? This kinda includes both how you process content as well as juggling baby, toddler, and work.
3) As a former tester I must-must-must ask: how do you hone your new craft? For example, have you already found your way into never-ending debates between context-driven school and ISTQB-ers, automation vs "manual" and etc? =)
Thank you, and sorry for the delay in getting back to you -- one of the ways I stay on top of things is by "batching" activities and candidly I got a lot more responses than I expected so I hadn't allotted enough time for responding last weekend, and during the week I was super focused on work.
My typical day changes season to season as my life changes, but right now it's basically...
I wake up around 7, check in on inboxes to make sure nothing's on fire, feed the baby, chat with the fam, eat breakfast, etc. send my oldest off to school, do some basic household maintenance, some days my mother in law or one of the local teenagers comes over to help with the baby during my meetings, but mostly the baby hangs out with me while I work -- she's young still, so I use a standing desk and a carrier, or let her be on an activity map while I use my laptop on the floor next to her. Sometimes I walk to the gym with her in the carrier for exercise, then work at my laptop while the childcare staff watches the baby for 90 minutes. They don't change diapers but I like it better than daycare because they just call me if she's fussy and I go get her.
Work is a lot of checking messages & email and doing quick burst testing, then trying to verify bug reports, it's not "traditional QA" so I don't write automated tests, the devs handle that part. My job is probably about a third what I call "tier two tech support," a third reproducing weird edge cases to verify and track down issues, and a third project management (i.e. helping prioritize dev tasking). I mostly hone this thru iterating over what our company's specific pain points are focusing on problem-solving rather than worrying about "the field" as a whole, I'm definitely not doing traditional QA like what my husband describes testers doing at his workplace (he's a software developer). I research when needed -- I spent 10 hours once doing a deep dive on mobile automated testing software -- but for the most part I'm responsive to needs more than worrying about philosophy.
But working for Readwise tends to include keeping up with my RSS feeds and articles and books as I test functionality (tracking a bug that hits text to speech on an ebook after 30 minutes doesn't require that the ebook be boring, after all!), which helps me keep up with my note-taking and such. I typically write and respond to newsletter things on the weekends because it's such a similar part of my brain that it's hard to do "after work." If I get a spark of inspiration though, I'll clock out and chase it to write an article. Having that kind of flexibility at work is huge.
The air fryer and instant pot have been enormous game changers in terms of getting dinner ready and stuff, and my husband is amazing at keeping our oldest playing outside after school, so he mostly takes point with our 3 year old, which helps. We switch after dinner -- he takes the baby and I take our oldest's bedtime routine. Then once our oldest is asleep we do more household stuff.
Thanks for the answer. Context is everything, as we talked about it in the discord, knowing how content creator lives makes huge difference into understanding their writing.
By the way, I have to disagree with your husband, because what you do is actually closer to QA than what he (and by proxy, you) think. First of all, there is a terminology shitshow about someone deciding to call testers "Quality Assurance" team. In 90% situations testers can't assure quality, they don't have enough power to do preventative work and decisions. So, that's quality control. Second part, with automation (specifically, UI automation), most of the testing devolved into weird "we're not as qualified as devs to do programming, yet we do the most hard programming tasks ever". So, if you're interested in being in this field, I'd suggest paying attention when you have time (not so much of it, right?) to stuff targeted to "quality coaches". Helping devs to write good automation so that they test what needs to be tested, being able to identify problems before tasks go into development ("requirements testing", "test analysis"), edge case predictor and risk analysis =)
Happy birthday, с днем варенья, bonne fête!
My questions:
1) Adding a vote for any more info about how you're using AIs to help with writing and daily life.
2) What's your typical day in life (or not so typical) ? This kinda includes both how you process content as well as juggling baby, toddler, and work.
3) As a former tester I must-must-must ask: how do you hone your new craft? For example, have you already found your way into never-ending debates between context-driven school and ISTQB-ers, automation vs "manual" and etc? =)
Thank you, and sorry for the delay in getting back to you -- one of the ways I stay on top of things is by "batching" activities and candidly I got a lot more responses than I expected so I hadn't allotted enough time for responding last weekend, and during the week I was super focused on work.
My typical day changes season to season as my life changes, but right now it's basically...
I wake up around 7, check in on inboxes to make sure nothing's on fire, feed the baby, chat with the fam, eat breakfast, etc. send my oldest off to school, do some basic household maintenance, some days my mother in law or one of the local teenagers comes over to help with the baby during my meetings, but mostly the baby hangs out with me while I work -- she's young still, so I use a standing desk and a carrier, or let her be on an activity map while I use my laptop on the floor next to her. Sometimes I walk to the gym with her in the carrier for exercise, then work at my laptop while the childcare staff watches the baby for 90 minutes. They don't change diapers but I like it better than daycare because they just call me if she's fussy and I go get her.
Work is a lot of checking messages & email and doing quick burst testing, then trying to verify bug reports, it's not "traditional QA" so I don't write automated tests, the devs handle that part. My job is probably about a third what I call "tier two tech support," a third reproducing weird edge cases to verify and track down issues, and a third project management (i.e. helping prioritize dev tasking). I mostly hone this thru iterating over what our company's specific pain points are focusing on problem-solving rather than worrying about "the field" as a whole, I'm definitely not doing traditional QA like what my husband describes testers doing at his workplace (he's a software developer). I research when needed -- I spent 10 hours once doing a deep dive on mobile automated testing software -- but for the most part I'm responsive to needs more than worrying about philosophy.
But working for Readwise tends to include keeping up with my RSS feeds and articles and books as I test functionality (tracking a bug that hits text to speech on an ebook after 30 minutes doesn't require that the ebook be boring, after all!), which helps me keep up with my note-taking and such. I typically write and respond to newsletter things on the weekends because it's such a similar part of my brain that it's hard to do "after work." If I get a spark of inspiration though, I'll clock out and chase it to write an article. Having that kind of flexibility at work is huge.
The air fryer and instant pot have been enormous game changers in terms of getting dinner ready and stuff, and my husband is amazing at keeping our oldest playing outside after school, so he mostly takes point with our 3 year old, which helps. We switch after dinner -- he takes the baby and I take our oldest's bedtime routine. Then once our oldest is asleep we do more household stuff.
Thanks for the answer. Context is everything, as we talked about it in the discord, knowing how content creator lives makes huge difference into understanding their writing.
By the way, I have to disagree with your husband, because what you do is actually closer to QA than what he (and by proxy, you) think. First of all, there is a terminology shitshow about someone deciding to call testers "Quality Assurance" team. In 90% situations testers can't assure quality, they don't have enough power to do preventative work and decisions. So, that's quality control. Second part, with automation (specifically, UI automation), most of the testing devolved into weird "we're not as qualified as devs to do programming, yet we do the most hard programming tasks ever". So, if you're interested in being in this field, I'd suggest paying attention when you have time (not so much of it, right?) to stuff targeted to "quality coaches". Helping devs to write good automation so that they test what needs to be tested, being able to identify problems before tasks go into development ("requirements testing", "test analysis"), edge case predictor and risk analysis =)