Memoirs of a Roadie

Other Voices

Posted on 4th January 2008

Back at the beginning of last month I got an interesting email. It came from an internal recruiter with The Mozilla Corporation. She was acting on behalf of David Ascher and was looking to recruit for a number of roles for the newly formed company MailCo. For those not aware of recent developments with Mozilla, MailCo has been setup as a subsidiary of The Mozilla Corporation to directly manage, develop and promote the Thunderbird mail client. The role that they had contacted me regarding was that of QA Community Lead.

From the aspect of being involved with QA activities I can understand why I would be considered, I can also understand that my Perl community profile could be seen as holding me in good standing for a raise in profile, and I can also appreciate that my years at MessageLabs put me in a good position to be accepted as having a fair knowledge of email and the associated protocols. But I still had to ask ... "why me?"

I don't see myself as a high profile player and I haven't previously been involved with any Mozilla related development, so it struck me a little unusual that they would want to get an outsider for the role. Following the initial email, I did a bit of research and tried to get a better understanding of what was expected of the role and what would be expected of me personally. After a telephone conversion I got the impression that the role would be very interesting and would probably have interested me from the QA perspective, as well as having the potential for me to attend a few more conferences around the world. But in the back of my mind was still the fact that I would still be taking on an immense task in getting to know the community and to inspire and lead it. As it turns out they also decided that getting someone already known within the Mozilla community would be better for them, and I think I would have to agree. Especially seeing as they are only planning to work with a small team and need everyone to be able to hit the ground running. However, it was extremely nice to be considered and has made me think a lot about how I am perceived outside of the Perl community.

Mr Roboto

Posted on 31st March 2007

Following my interviews yesterday for other roles within the company, I've been offered the role of QA Automation Analyst. An unusual role in that I'm going to be looking at ways to enable the automation of current test procedures, so we can have complete regression tests running overnight, allowing the testers to concentrate on edge cases and the like.

It's pretty much going to be a similar excise to automating CPAN Testing, so I should be quite suited to it. I've been surprised that there isn't already some automation, as it's been talked about for some time. I guess they've just needed someone like me to be around to take advantage of :)

It will add more validity to me going to conferences, talking about testing, and being involved in testing workshops, etc, so that makes me happier. If I'd stayed in a traditional development role, it might have been more difficult to justify several people going to YAPC::Europe. This way it'll just be me from the QA department.

The Day the World Went Away

Posted on 30th March 2007

For the past two weeks I've been at risk of redundancy. It's not been a very inspiring time. Privately I could say much more, but publically I think I will have to leave it at that ... for now.