If you’re here, it’s either an accident, or you’re wondering what I’ve been up to for the last year. If you’re not interested, please do feel free to click the “Back” button in your browser with haste! (I won’t mind!)
For anybody not already clued in, when the last place I worked (Bromium) got acquired (by HP), I decided I wanted to break off for a bit and invest in myself. I had a long list of things I wanted to do before I buckled down for the next slog, and so that is exactly what I’ve done. A year to invest in myself and here I am now boring you with a brief summary of it all (remember, the back button is still there!).
13 months of sabbatical and counting has been great fun. Sitting on a couch? Mostly no. What have I achieved? Everything and nothing. Was it how I thought it would be? Pretty much. Was it worth it? Hell yes. Am I done? Not quite…
I’ve actually been working on a whole bunch of things, one of which is the software testing book that this website exists to support. I didn’t want to “resurface” after a year of silence without addressing what I’ve been up to, and so to that end, this is my “I’ve been busy, I swear!” blog post. This is a thousand-foot-view, but to friends (or, heaven-forbid, anybody else?), if you want to know more about anything, just ask me!
As I said, I’ve worked on lots of things (I’ll mention some of the smaller ones in a bit), but I could probably mark the three biggest projects as follows:
1) The aforementioned book which aims to guide people on how to get into and nail software testing.
2) An AI program to try and help identify new antibiotics.
3) Building trading robots to play the stock markets.
The first of those was something I’d been working on before I even left my job, and the latter two were opportunities that appeared via personal contacts and seemed like a fun challenge. And that mostly sums up how I’ve been choosing all of the projects:
- First and foremost – it needed to be an interesting problem that I fancied tackling!
- It had to be a challenge.
- I had to learn a new skill.
- And finally, it had to have the potential (however remote) to lead somewhere. A theoretical business venture, released software, a book etc…
Importantly, each project did have success criteria, and I made a point of not task-switching too much – I did actually want some tangible results from my time. For instance, for the testing book, I did want to release whatever I created (whether it sells a single copy to my mum, or ten thousand), and I have code and other things to show for some of the other projects.
The software testing book: “What Did You Even Do?”
I think Software Testing is easy. I think most people could do it, and I’ve seen people with little or no IT background dive in and do a great job of it. You just need the correct application of effort, while decent guidance on where to start hardly goes amiss. Enter my book.
It aims to outline a path to becoming a software tester without spending large sums on courses, whilst filling lots of gaps that I feel are left if you simply studied the official ISTQB foundation software testing material.
The book has been completely written for some time now – I’m just grinding my way through the many edits and review cycles. My plan is to release some bits and pieces online to see how they’re received, whilst polishing and finally releasing the rest of the content in due course.
The AI
To be blunt: I consider AI to be dark magic. I’ve always thought AI undeniably had its uses, obviously, but I’ve remained deeply skeptical of it, and even more skeptical of people’s tendency to believe uttering the words AI or “neural network” will essentially solve a problem.
And yet, I’ve always found the subject interesting and wanted to learn more, for fun. I’ve now done a bunch of studying and worked on a couple of personal projects, and I’m at least as convinced as before.
I studied an AI/Neural Network course on Udemy and I used those skills to write a tool (what use is learning without practice?) to analyse data with/for my girlfriend, who is currently studying a PhD at the University of Warwick. We have some real results/predictions, which will be followed up with some experiments in the lab.
The Stock Market
I learned a whole bunch about Forex, investing and the stock markets. I worked with my cousin on some forex trading robots. He had some ideas, I wrote code, we iterated.
This involved learning to write code for MetaTrader5 (using MQL5), as well as integrating with Python. Some of the robots we worked on had direct, codeable trading rules, but I also had fun attempting the impossible task of predicting forex using neural networks. Yes, I know a bunch of you will laugh at the notion, I did too, and I still do. Neural networks are not a silver bullet, and as mentioned, I’m extremely skeptical of them. Nonetheless, as an academic exercise, it was a lot of fun. I was never convinced they’d do anything remotely perfect, but the question was, could I make something just barely good enough to make some money.
Asides from the work on the robots themselves, I spent a bunch of time working on supporting tools and frameworks to work out if I’d achieved anything, and therein lies why I actually consider this task a huge success at present, for one reason above all: I didn’t waste money!
I did enough testing on my trading robots that I’ve convinced myself not to throw my money into them, despite what were at times very promising results – my testing self beat my developer self in the head to head. Very happy and sad times. My developer self did succeed in many ways, however – the algorithms at least technically appeared to achieve the things I required of them, but sadly I’m just not convinced they make money… at least yet? Hope springs eternal!
Everything else
So, what else?
- I worked on a board game!
- I worked on some fiction ideas I have, some of which I was already working on pre-sabbatical.
- I did a bunch of reading on startups: A bunch of blogs, a couple books, etc…
- Attended a pre-accelerator workshop.
- Attended some conferences.
- Made house improvements.
- Provided project management assistance to my brother (with his fledgling business: https://konceptkitz.com/).
- I studied some other courses/tutorials, including things like “Bootstrap”, “React” and “Apache Spark”.
So yeah, that list covers what I can remember without consulting all of my notes. If you can make the time (and financial room) to do something like this, and have a list-as-long-as-your-arm-of-things-you’d-like-to-do-if-you-only-had-the-time, I can highly recommend it.
And so with that, I’ll fade quietly into the background again for a bit, and see if I can’t get the book done! To that end, if anybody especially fancies reviewing a chapter or two, do drop me an email, I’d love to know what people think!
