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Thoughts toward a "Pseudo"-resume ... (weak attempt at geek joke)

Aug 2012: Five months ago, my original intention was to update my skills and knowledge of the current 'trends'in software testing, and implicitly, web development.
I've made great strides (of course, studying 14/7) but every few days, I read about, or Mark mentions "another "thing I need to learn...", i.e., some new tool or framework or ..
The scary things is that I want to learn, or at least learn about, eveything.

It is when I look at job listing that I realize that the gap - how much I've missed in recent years- is far wider than I'd realized.

During the past twelve years
...as the size and usage of the internet expanded and web design and development saw the addition of Cascading Style Sheets, Flash, Javascript and its recent resurgence (proliferation of server-side JavaScript implementations and node.js), AJAX
the evolution of HTML to XHTML and now HTML5, the Semantic Web design movement, Single Page website design, User-Generated Content, and, more recently mobile and other device types on which to access the web and run native apps, and now the sprint-forward of HTML5 and CSS3 and all related "New Exciting Web Techologies"
... and as the expansion of the use of relatively new programming languages, such as Ruby, Python 2.0, PHP and web application frameworks and the decline of the use of Perl
... as well as the emergence of new software development disciplines - Agile for example, was introduced in 2001 with the publication of Schwaber and Beedle's Agile Software Development with Scrum -
AND
... as the software testing methods adapted, and became more diverse and automated, in part with the assistance of less expensive or free automation tools, and while testing may not be dead, as predicted and asserted by some, the role of testers.. has most definitely changed

I wasn't looking ...

or, at least, wasn't seeing, nor, it seemed, were my coworkers or shrinking circle of friends,
(except one, who, for the past three years, as a startup, has been developing a complex web based application, but whose efforts had gotten little of my attention, even though we live in the same house).

Meanwhile....

I worked in ___ QA/Test/Release___ on large, complex, high perfromance integrated systems for LARGE SCALE, image-based --BACK END, remittance document processing, the clients for which are high profile banks. Originally created in the late '90s and developed with C and Perl on both FreeBSD and RHEL (Red Hat Linux), these systems operate on private intranets with web technologies limited to Apache, HTML,CSS, Perl and some Javascript. The complexity is such that all testing must be manual and exploratory, within a loosely 'waterfall' development/test model (though we didn't refer to it by name).
Though the system was large, the developemnt and test/release groups combined were a diminutive 16 souls and we worked very closely together and with the small customer support group.

It is a 'real challenge', to describe in a few sentences, the GIGANTIC scope and difficulty of testing/integrating/releasing RIDS - the 'learning curve' for which is six months to a year - so as to convey
the level of my problem-solving abilities as well as the kind of environments in which I can work and the daily challenges I can meet
Most people are unfamilar with, and therfore cannot appreciate, just what is involved in the developing, integrating, testing, releasing and supporting of project-based systems such as those with which I have most of my experience.

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The skills and expertise that I used regularly were ..

Generally ... borrowing change.org's format:


Accomplishments ?

This would have to be routine things: i.e., because in neither of my jobs were there opportunities to do anything exceptional, or, rather, to be recognized as doing something exceptional, which is generally the case with positions in qa/testing/writing. It is the developers and support people who tend to get recognition for such...


What I've been studying... is the subject of this website as well as the website itself (see Study Topics and Resources)

The options for learning have changed dramatically in 2012 with
the creation of free online education resources - Codecademy, Stanford affiliates Udacity
and Coursera and now Harvard/MIT's EdX, as well as an endless source of online technical tutorials and discussion forums. (Introduced in Oct was"Web Platform Docs", a new community-driven site that aims to become a comprehensive and authoritative source for web developer documentation. )
Via meetup.com dozens of SF Bay Area technology groups have established themselves and meet regularly to share and discuss ideas. In the past year, several of these groups were formed by women, for women, in part as an effort to get more women into the field.
The continued growth and accessiblitliy of Open Source software via services such as github enables anyone to view and participate in and existing project or create one's own project

I have taken advantage of all of these opportunities


.. so, that is all 'fine and good', but I must answer the queston "but what can/could YOU do for US, right now"

What I want to (and think I can) do in the future - using my new skills and 'old'

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The Challenge

I'd really like to work for (5-yr-old) change.org, but see that, at this point, I only partially qualify (underlined are the things I don't yet have):

change.org - Quality Engineer

change.org - Front End Engineer

change.org - Web Applications Engineer

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