I’m a jack of all trades and a master of none. Always in the middle of everything, wondering if my “+” shape may someday become the desired “T” everyone talks about.
.NET programmer in my early days, I were “side promoted” [sic] to process and project management area, where I learned to deal with people’s resistance to change, at the same time I realized that change is always desirable: good if the change is positive in itself, even better if the lesson learned makes you improve in the long run.
And then, I switched to a small startup and I became a QA. Alone in a growing company dedicated to home automation with a set of software applications hungry for quality, but burdened with tons of bureaucracy and ancient procedures inherited from production-oriented processes (hello, test cases written in spreadsheets living in a public shared folder!).
Then, I had the privilege of becoming the manager of a group of seven wonderful recent graduate IT professionals (well, one of them was actually quite experienced!) who committed the insanity of letting me mentor them. And together, we improved processes and software quality, becoming almost a family and building amazing things, like an automation framework based in Selenium or KNX device simulators running in docker containers inside a set of Linux servers communicating through a internal network bounded and linked by Fortinet technology.
Between all these adventures and misfortunes, I studied Computer Science Engineering, I took a break to live in Poland for five months (Erasmus at your thirties is an interesting experience), and -why not?-, I took a R&D Master Degree in Systems and Control Engineering.
I love Linux and coffee, and I have programmed in VB.NET, C#, Java, JavaScript, Typescript, node.js, VB.NET and Python (even BASIC and C, but in that time I still had hair in my head).
I have patched and improved our PHP-based test manager tool (Hello, Testlink, my old friend), and linked all our tools in a brand-new application able to automate all the testing pipeline.
Whenever I have needed a language, I have used it, so my day to day doesn’t consist of going deeper and deeper in a single technology. Databases? Sure! I’ve dealt with SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, Oracle and PostgreSQL.
Today, I’m an “agile” IT professional able to analyze a requirement, develop a module, automate its tests or designing a test plan. Someone calls that ranged profile as “SDET”, but I’m not sure if my role even fits in that acronym.
Oh, I almost forgot! I get a call every now an then to extinguish fires, usually with bash and SQL.
I like my work to speak for me, and I keep the foolish belief that when your workers feel comfortable, they do their best for the things they believe in.