The new adventure

I've been looking for a new job for sometime - the daily commute was a real grind, waterfall projects where I never met the developers, working with companies who treated testing as a production line with testers as resources that could be swapped in/out, managers obsessed by counts of tests, days where the entire day seemed to be one conference call after another...

Being part of the test community was a great help when I started looking and I had a number of interesting opportunities put my way but then I saw this job ad which Matt Heusser ( thanks Matt ! ) posted to the s/w testing mailing list. I was intrigued and excited by it so went and found out more about the company - Atomic Object - liked what I read about them so sent in an application.

To cut a long story very short ( the long story is likely to be my submission to the next issue of The Testing Planet ) I was made an offer which I've accepted - though I have to wait awhile before I can be a proper employee...

The one big complication is that Atomic are in Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA and I'm in Bracknell Berks, UK...but I have a US wife which helps the visa process somewhat so early next year ( no jinx ) I'll be heading off to the US.

Grand Rapids has a good tester community - Pete Walen and Matt Heusser are there so I already have friends but until then I'm a contractor working from the UK.

It will be a challenge - Elisabeth Hendrickson mentions her visit to Atomic Object in her Exploratory Testing in an Agile Context session that she did at Agile 2011 and how she found it difficult to break the apps. Much better to have this sort of challenge than to be able to quickly rack up 700 defects as I did in my last project.

Working remotely as a contractor is also a challenge but there is Skype, Yammer, IM, email - not ideal but it will do until the visa arrives.

I'm already appreciating the extra spare time I have with no 4 hour commute - halfway through Learn Ruby The Hard Way and back to participating more in the online testing community - which is a good thing as I can return the favours I got from being part of it.