Hello and welcome

Another software engineer here, the average one, test focused

My professional experience

Through my entire career I keep switching roles and responsibilities. I started as a full stack without any experience, first steps with frontend, first backend language, first database. No more than hard work, over hours, failures and only small successes between all of that. No standards, no testing, just trying to make things work

Then more structured full-time job - frontend engineer, huge single portal project, RWD, SCSS with BEM, jQuery - old times. I VIMed all the code from this point

But to not make you bored. Next, after some time, not so long, I started to dig deeper into testing. Unit tests are obvious to devs, but having chance to stand on the other side as QAs do, became so interesting, that I am all there now (I heard a lot, that it's unusual direction to switch from dev to testing). So switched to Manual Tester, got familiar with automation (obviously it's easier having programming skills), and finally touched CI/ CD, reports, analytics, statistics and graphs. But the best I got from all these years is...

Bash

I use VIM and terminal for years every day. First it was very basic, like using simple commands to move around the system, copy couple things, but mostly - build the project and serve it, till the day, when I've fallen in love with Bash. It was my new sickness. I freaked out to write everything in it to get fluent, even if it was bad idea to solve problem using Bash. From simple tasks, complex algorithms to "automate everything" - I mean boring daily stuff to save motivation and time for more interesting aspects of daily job, that are topics for my stories

And AI appeared

Unfortunately AI appeared, and it knows a lot. Many of us asks ourselves "is AI going to replace me?" maybe, but actually it doesn't stop me, to stay calm, be myself, stay brain-sharp and still train solving problems on my own, specially that vibe-coded sources vary in its quality. I believe that testing and security will grow and will be invaluable in the near future

So here I am, joined medium and stepped into fictional character - Colin Sampler - shoes to reinvent wheel, analyze and train Bash. I feel it's time to share my experience and also get from it as much as possible. Writing for serious? Never tried it. Let's see where it will take me next