I spent 2 years reconnecting with my family in England following Covid. I spent my time developing new skills: conserving historic buildings, learning the guitar and reading philosophy.
Almost 200 years old and serving over 60 countries, HSBC presents a unique challenge for QA. Brought on as part of a new Agile initiative, I quickly became part of a small group championing best practices in both testing methodology and framework design.
Keen to continue my professional development, Sophos was a great opportunity to take me out of my comfort zone. This was a greenfield project which allowed me to approach the thorny problem of testing a highly unstable Windows driver with pragmatism and creativity.
This was my first experience working on a large test suite. It gave me invaluable insights into the human aspects of QA - poorly maintained tests, challenges associated with analysis at scale, and the importance of maintaining good working relationships.
Ultraleap was a well-funded startup expecting to rapidly expand. They hired me as their first DevOps engineer to manage what turned out to be a pretty small network. That gave me a lot of freedom to experiment with extra-curricular projects like future-proofing their build system.
As first jobs go, this one was a dream. Joining as a manual QA with an emphasis on root cause analysis, within a year I was spearheading a new initiative on automation - building a test framework from the ground up!