When I was a kid, I fell in love with computers. My first computer was a KAYPRO I and later a KAYPRO II (CP/M based machines, not MS-DOS). I still remember thinking, "what in the world am I going to do with 191kb of storage?" when double-sided floppies came out. I was a hobbyist programmer, starting with BASIC and Turbo Pascal. When I was in college, I found a love for Organic Chemistry and ended up getting a Masters degree in Chemistry. During graduate school I met a guy that introduced me to his recruiter at Microsoft. I ended up getting job offers from a pharmaceutical company and Microsoft. The offer from Microsoft was too exciting to pass up even though it was less money. I spent ten years at Microsoft, five in Word (SDE) and five in SharePoint (SDET I/II).

I've been in software QA for almost 15 years doing both manual and automated testing. Over the years I've written automation in WordBasic and Word VBA but more recently C# and JavaScript. In the last six months or so at work, we changed our focus to Java and Selenium and I do a little C#/Selenium for tools here and there.

Over the years I've spent a lot of time reading blogs of LOTS of Q&As on SO to learn and improve my knowledge of C#, JavaScript, Java, and Selenium. I don't know what I would have done without it. Reading blogs and articles is great but if you don't already know and/or trust the blogger, you may get bad info. SO isn't bullet proof but it's the only place I know of where you can get rated answers which really helps. There's not much you can't find on SO.

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