Happy Birthday, Adventures in Automation: Three Years and Counting!

When I started this blog three years ago, I still wasn't sure how I ever was going to switch from manual testing to automation development. I kept trying to switch departments at my previous company for years, but never had much luck. Then the layoff happened, and I found myself job searching after five years, finding that much of the software testing job market in Boston had changed.

I talked over with my wife my idea of postponing job searching for two months, living off of my severance pay, while I re-learned how to code and studied automation development -- one last big push to try to cross over.

This time, I did things a bit differently:

• Taking Alan Richardson's online course, Selenium WebDriver with Java for the third time in three years, this time instead of simply listening and taking notes on his material, I made sure to type out code out as he did in his video lessons, causing things to finally stick in my mind.
• I placed my results, a basic automation framework on my new GitHub account.
• My wife suggested I turn my copious amount of automation research notes into a blog. I wrote my first few articles that January: What is a QA Engineer, Waterfall + QA, Before Waterfall, and Agile Software Development.

Now, I was able to go on interviews and talk intelligently about how to put together a rudimentary automation framework, and point to code that I had written. After a tough three months, I landed my first automation development position.

Since then, it has been a fun-filled three years, learning about automation, capturing what I have been learning on this blog:

2015: I started this blog, and my first automation development position with Selenium WebDriver and Java testing the user interface of eCommerce software.

2016: The editor of TeachBeacon.com, after discovering this blog, recruited me to write my first published article for his tech magazine. I started digging into REST API testing with Stripe. By the end of 2016 I am using Selenium with Node.JS with Nightwatch.js.

2017: I become the Meetup Organizer of the newly rebranded Ministry of Testing - Boston -- the first time I was the main person in charge of a Meetup group. Through social media campaigns I grow membership from 300 to 600 people in the first six months. I hosted 21 of the 30 Meetup events on our calendar. I also obtained a contract putting together a proof-of-concept of a mobile testing framework using Appium + Java.

2018: January 2018 I launched a YouTube channel based on this blog! Feel free to Subscribe! The Ministry of Testing - Boston hits 900 members. I also found a permanent job writing automation at the webservice and RESTful API layer, using service virtualization using Chef + Kitchen.

All these successes I have had are due to this blog.

A blog post on job interviews became an article, a talk I gave to a new Meetup, and was developed into an online conference talk a year later.

Thank you, dear reader, for all of your support.

And thank you, most of all, to my wonderful wife, Melissa. Thank you for spending the past seven years with me, and for marrying me five-and-a-half year ago. My life is what it is because of you.

Happy Testing!

-T.J. Maher
Sr. QA Engineer, Software Engineer in Test

Meetup Organizer, Ministry of Testing - Boston

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