NaNoWriMo 2014 - Week Three

Where our hero discovers novel writing isn't as bad as last week, and interrogates some characters. After ten years of novel writing, we made it to the Night of Writing Dangerously! Saturday 15th 32667 words, 2017 today. Wrote in Bread and Cocoa after breakfast, before heading out to

NaNoWriMo 2014 - Week Two

NaNoWriMo lore says that Week Two is an icy blast of cold on Week One's sunny progress. I'm definitely feeling the ill effects of not having a road-map to where this novel is going. Lots of cool characters, but not much idea of things they desperately

NaNoWriMo 2014 - Week One

Week One is where you ride the wave and stack up as many words as you can in preparation for the cold shock of the dreaded Week Two. I realised this week if I finish book 4 of my trilogy (and then go back and finish the story for book

The Red Team Rules for Software QA

I found the Original 12 Red Team Rules recently (there's profanity in the list), and a lot of them are relevant to life as a software quality advocate/analyst/engineer/assurance person with a bit of modification. Rule 1: Know when the test will be over.(Was: Always

Candidates, things your interviewers want you to know

(This is close to my heart because I’ve done a bunch of interviews lately, some good, some not so good.) If a skill or qualification is on your resume, I will ask you about it, especially if it's one I also have. Claim to know C# and

Your software project might have a QA if...

Some of these are mine, some I lifted from the company Slack channel for Quality Advocacy. * You're used to finding Cyrillic or Greek or Mandarin in the database * There's code in place to stop you copying War and Peace into the app multiple times * You know

"You're an introvert? Are you sure?"

I get that a lot. My usual response is that I can play extrovert really well, but it's draining. With one person, or two, I'm just fine. With people I'm familiar with and comfortable with, like my knit group, I'm OK. With

Sh*t my QA says

There is a bug, I just haven't found it yet. Well, it's broken on my machine! In the Danish version of Windows, if you click really fast, the app just crashes. It doesn't work when I put Cyrillic text in. Or Greek, Hebrew, or

Favourite writing tools

My TWSBI 580 fountain pen is one of my favourites. It's not the most expensive fountain pen, but it always starts well, writes smoothly, and the piston-fill ink reservoir holds a LOT of ink. It's currently filled with the original formulation of Noodler's Black

From electronic to paper

I'd been using an electronic task list for keeping my to-do's, and it worked well enough, sort of. I got stuff done, but the list of completed tasks was flaky and didn't always display. The main list stopped updating, some tasks would duplicate, and