Do you ever feel like no job's ever quite the right fit for you? A couple months ago I was on a call with 2 friends I met on 𝕏 in my early days. While we caught up, some-crazy-how we ended up on the subject on my old YouTube channel. I was that guy who recklessly deleted social media accounts claiming, "I'll never go back!" The cloud is Facebook (and of course I always did) So I don't have any photos from old Facebook accounts. All the old parkour videos I recorded with my friends when we...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Yesterday I told you something NUTS happened to me. I also told you I'd tell you about it today. BUT FIRST.....obviously I have to derail the conversation to tell you a story 😜 You right now 2014 was a wild year. I had been in the parkour scene for 4 years. Did a crazy jump at Devil's Lake State Park that I'm never ever going to repeat. I was on top of the world, and I felt my Spidey Sense tingling, telling me the ol' Uncle Ben refrain: With great power comes great responsibility 🕷️ I felt a...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
You know that feeling when you discover something that makes you go, Huh, well that's interesting 🧐 Saw something like that in the paper this morning. Learning for everyone! 🎉 I'm still a newbie in the Door County area. We've only been here since July. So I'm still learning a lot. But this program's been around since 2020, allowing community members and public school teachers in Sturgeon Bay -- where I live -- to share skills with the community. My favorite part is that the teachers don't...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Udemy's not what it used to be. You might think it's cool there's a platform that offers learning for super cheap. Hell, I've benefited from it. Mosh Hamedani put out a sick Node.js course back in 2018 that I gobbled up. Looking back, that course prepared me pretty well for API testing, since I had to literally build an API (without AI, yikes). But as a creator, there's no incentive to make good courses on Udemy. I was chatting with a QA educator/consultant yesterday, you probably know them....
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
You don't need a better memory. I had a chat with a friend yesterday. We used to work together when I was getting started in QA. Got to meet her new dog, chat about goings-on over the past few months. We've both been craaaazy busy, so this was the first catch-up in a while. Towards the end of the call I felt a little stupid. Why? Well, I was going to just schedule our next chat later that day over text. Out of the blue, she had this simple but brilliant alternative: Why don't we schedule it...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read
AI literally can't replace you. It's not good enough to do that yet, and maybe it never will be. If you're one of the people hiding under your bed in fear of AI, start listening to people other than "hype bros". Plenty of perspectives on this will tell you AI is better as an assistant taking orders from you than the other way around. You have goals. AI serves those goals. It doesn't give you goals, it helps you chart a path to achieving them. Just think for a moment, seriously. Why would you...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
It's weird that this all started by giving. Whenever you think of business, you probably think of: "sales-y" people cringe "LinkedInfluencers" sleazy marketing tactics selfish rich dudes driving mid-life crisis cars Or maybe you don't. But nobody thinks being an employee is gross. On the flip side, plenty of people have strong feelings about business owners or starting a business themselves. There's no "middle ground" there. Either you'd "love it" or "hate it" (or you "totally would" or...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
You don't know what's coming next. That's one of the driving forces for me. I'm not sure what challenge will be thrown at me next, so I only have one choice: keep growing. You might think I'm weird for this, but I see my fears in a different light than most people. When I notice I'm scared of something, I see it as a threat. Not the thing I'm afraid of, the fear itself is the threat. I think to myself: One day, this fear will prevent me from doing something important. This morning, I opened...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Hey so....yeah, that workshop? Turns out, her audience wanted a virtual workshop so she moved it to Tuesday. Why can't I do Tuesday, you ask? I'm doing my own live workshop for my students in Social QA Bootcamp. Showing them how to do API test automation with Playwright. And I'm picking my wife up from work halfway into the workshop so.... ...yeah. Priorities 😉 Nothing says I can't still hop on a call with the marketing coach/musician when we both have a spare moment, but it seems it won't be...
2 months ago • 1 min read
