New job, new title: Software Engineer in Test at Good Start Genetics

I just started a new job on Monday at Good Start Genetics.

Along with the new job came a new title: Software Engineer in Test.

It's the first time in twenty years that I do not have the words "QA" in the job title. It's a brave new world.

The funny part is that it was supposed to be another Senior QA Engineer position. By my personal timetable, I didn't think I would be able to make that leap for another three years.

It was the coding test that did it.

For the past two years, I have been coming up with random Programming Projects, trying to reinforce what I have been learning on the job, doing independent research, trying to put the tools and technology I was learning in the larger context of the software testing industry.

The weekend before, I was playing around with Protractor, trying to introduce myself to the Node.js / JavaScript automation ecosystem. When it came time to figure out how to add a few end-to-end browser tests to an already running Nightwatch.js project, I found out there were a lot of similarities to what I had done for the previous week's take-home coding test.

Thank you for all the friends and family -- especially my wife -- who supported me during the last two months of intense job searching.

Thanks goes out to Fitbit for setting me out on the path to being an automation developer. Thank you, James Moore for bringing me onto your team two years ago, setting up a month's worth of study sessions in Selenium WebDriver and Java. And thank you, Lark and Joon for coaching and mentoring me. And thank you, Steve, for giving me a two month head start to job search.

And to all the manual testers who are trying to switch to automated testing...

Happy Testing!

-T.J. Maher
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// Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test, Software Tester since 1996.
// Contributing Writer for TechBeacon.
// "Looking to move away from manual QA? Follow Adventures in Automation on Facebook!"