Engineering Career Presentation to UW Computer Science Undergrads

In January I had the honor to present a quick overview of my career to the UW Computer Science undergraduates. It was great to see the upcoming UW engineers, you could just sense that there is a lot of talent and curiosity in the room. I hope that they took note of a thing or two from my way and build on that.

Here is a copy of the slides for your pleasure:

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SDET / QA Engineer Interview Checklist

After interviewing and hiring hundreds of engineers over the past 12+ years I have come up with a few checklists. I wanted to share one of those with you so you could conduct comprehensive interviews of QA Engineers for your team. I use this checklist when I review incoming resumes and during the interview. It keeps me from missing areas that ensure a good team and technology fit. I hope you make good use of them. If you think there are good questions or topics that I have missed - get in touch with me! SDE/T or QA Engineer interview checklist from Mike Borozdin If you like this checklist you might want to check out these posts: Emotional Intelligence in Software Teams and Good-bye manual tester, hello crowdsourcing!

Code versus Configuration

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Intuitive Programming - Comments

Comments are a topic of vibrant discussion. Ever since programmers could leave some text in the program that was ignored by the machine the debate started: “what’s a good comment, what’s a bad comment, why comment?” There are endless instructions to programmers that say many of the following things: 1) Describe your function! 2) Don’t write in the comment what you wrote in the code. 3) Tell people why you are doing what you are doing. What I think has been missing from this discourse is the audience for comments and through those audiences there is intent. The code is being read, skimmed or analyzed by people and tools. So what are the audiences and reading modes? 1) Maintaining and enhancing the code 2) Skimming through the entire module or file to figure out what the overall structure is 3) Reviewing the test files to check out the test coverage and edge cases 4) Seeing the docstrings of functions while being in a separate file altogether 5) Reviewi

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