TPM Life, or Why I build

About a year ago…

I took a leap out of the QA Engineering world I’d grown to love and into something new. I decided that the time had come for me to get out of the individual contributor role and into one that would allow me to facilitate teams to produce quality software. There were various reasons for this, none of which really matter in the grand scheme of things, but the main reason is that I felt like I had grown tired of building, and was confident that clearing the path for my team would be more rewarding.

You can probably guess by the title of this post how that went. Don’t get me wrong: It has been a rewarding process, and I am loving being the one to un-stick the developers when they need clarification on a requirement, or helping the business get new features into their product that they didn’t even know they needed. It’s just that I didn’t realize how much I was going to miss digging into code, finding out why something works (or, more often, doesn’t), and being able to build something.

_Now comes the good news_: I can still build stuff.

True: It’s not my job anymore, but no one will keep me from building stuff at home, or picking up a support ticket and doing research, or helping the QA testers unravel expected behavior vs. bug. That’s part of what makes a team successful: For each member to be able and willing to dig in, get their fingers dirty, so to speak, and fix some code. The satisfaction that comes from uncovering a bug, being able to point to a specific line of code and say “There’s the problem!”, is akin to, at the risk of over selling it, feeling like Indiana Jones finding an ancient civilization.

Building a website, a RESTful service, hell, even a HelloWorld app in a new language, is immensely satisfying to a lot of people, and I am just one of them, apparently. I’m still coming to grips with that, as a man of a certain age.

Yes, there will be more posts coming up about soft skills, management tactics, SCRUM methodologies, and the like. It’s only natural for things to change as the years go on, and it is never a bad thing to learn and grow. I truly am enjoying the ride, and wouldn’t change it if I could.

That said, I will always be a person that loves to build.