What's Your Win For The Week? 16th January 2021

Career Career Development
#1

What win(s) do you have this week? Let’s celebrate them :muscle:

My wins for this week:

  • I got my daily/regular tasks properly planned into my calendar which feels like a win because I was previously trying to fit them around irregular things that popped up rather than fitting the things that pop up around the things that I need to get done each day. I’m hoping this will give me a better structure for achieving goals throughout the year.
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#2

My big win was scheduling (finally) time to take an Azure certification that I’ve been preparing for lately (Az-900) since I’m a big fat procrastinator having a “deadline” makes me more committed to learning on consistent and a regular basis. I have a good feeling about it, it’s pretty basic stuff, but on the other hand, these certification exams can have purposefully misleading questions, so I guess I shouldn’t be too cooky either!

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#3

My wins:

  • I finally worked out how to take a full end to end test of one of our platforms with cypress. There had been a bit alluding me for months but with lodash _.times I solved it and have a reuseable basic end to end test now.
  • I had my first mentoring session with our companies founder. It was really good and she gave me a bunch to think about.
  • I have been totally failing to go outside for a walk but I have been making time to exercise each day and I think it has been improving my mood.
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#4

I love this thread so much, each week needs some lovely positivity!

I had a tough week as I made an incorrect call as Scrum Master on scope creep and I had to reinstall the OS on my laptop as it ceased taking updates and wouldn’t boot very happily anymore.

But, looking on the brighter side of things, I learnt a lot more about web testing, as this is my first gig in web it is really illuminating to see all the cool resources there are for this, but it has made me quite uncomfortable feeling like I don’t know anything. In spite of that discomfort, I am really happy to be learning a lot.

The big win of the week personally was that I continued with the #100DaysOfMove and I think that’s helping me start each day much better!

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#5

My main win for the week was delivering the first session of a software testing bootcamp focused on those affected by COVID, looking to retrain or unlikely to return to work after furlough.

The attendees were an engaged and diverse group and the first of two groups that will be taking the training. The course is free and funded as part of the Government campaign to retrain people.

I’m so honoured to get to do this and work with some truly wonderful people too.

8 Likes
#6

My wins this week:

  • Spoke about my mental health RE: Home schooling on The Club, thanks for all the great responses!
  • Took a break from work to play in the snow with the kids, we built snow chairs!
  • We are re-formatting our QA team stand-ups + other meetings based on my feedback from end of year retro.
  • Completed my test code for the sprint and got it reviewed and merged in, well before end of sprint.
  • Won a game of Terraforming Mars
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#7

Work-related:

  • Had some good discussions about testing some very unfamiliar (to me), primarily hardware-based, systems. Talked about what could go wrong and starting to think about how to test around those risks.
  • Made some decisions to get my LinkedIn and CV up to date and start seeing what else is around.

Away from work:

  • Made some progress on getting plans for an extension to our house in for planning permission.
  • Finally started chipping away at the challenges on Red Dead Redemption 2 in some downtime. Such a huge and great game!
7 Likes
#8

Not much for others but a big one for me; created a front-end for a collection of Python :snake: command-line scripts I regularly use. This will make it easier for others in the organisation to use these scripts

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#9

Epic Game! Congrats!

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#10

I found hidden Christmas chocolate :raised_hands:t2:

I didn’t feel like I’d had many wins, but looking back now I actually did:

  • Went out twice for a run
  • Studied
  • Did a lunchtime exercise class
  • Attended 2 CPD webinars
  • Work & schoolwork balanced much better from Tues onwards (we don’t talk about Monday)
  • Less evening screen time and more reading books
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#11
  • Smashed a presentation to stakeholders on customer feedback related to our “pre prod” environment.
  • Prepared an update for the weekly team meeting , unlike last week when I was unprepared and went blank :wink:
  • Made sure we did a recognition piece in our QA Forum - we call it the “badass tester” and everyone puts on the board all the good things that we’ve done lately.
  • “Thought” about a personal development plan and had a mentor session with someone -
  • Did some running…
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#12
  • So, four-and-a-bit months into my first testing role, which I started studying for late May last year through MoT and TAU, after getting a deeper understanding of where most our projects are at and learning how to write tests with our backend language so I can have more of an informed opinion, we’re starting to put automated tests on the CI/CD pipeline sometime next month. Very happy to have been working with management and the senior developers on starting the culture change to absorb company growth.
  • Realised I was over-committing myself after a good therapist session, and decided to do 1/2 to 2/3 of the tasks I try to do, and found myself doing the deeper testing that kept escaping me before.
  • Started writing my first blog-post since getting the job, on testing software for intuitiveness.
5 Likes
#13

My win for last week was finally finishing my chalk bag. I used up some scrap material and an old pair of jeans. I altered a pattern and it worked!

Work stuff - I got important things done even though I felt like crawling into a hole and sleeping. So I managed to get things done. I know it was just my body going through something so I let myself focus on “must dos” and didn’t add extra pressure to get other not-absolutely-necessary things done.

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