Culturally Shallow

I finally made it here to SXSW Interactive 2009! I wanted to do a quick post before running back for the SXSW Opening Remarks by Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos.com I was just in Secrets of Javascript Library talk , where John Resig is one of the panelists. John Resig, you know, the creator of jQuery. There were very good overview information there for YUI3, ARIA and meta language framework presented respectively by Nate Koechley, Becky Gibson and Andrew Dupont respectively, but I personally found John Resig’s talk most inspiring. One of the things John presented was the the solution he had to ensure that the code that they check in would be backwards compatible with all the list of browsers jQuery support. With 6 test suites for each browsers, there would be 66 tests that they had to run for each commit statement that the team makes, making it not feasible to do so all the time. Resign used what he called Distributed Manual Testing to test backward compatibility. The site would enlist volunteer testers to do testing on all browsers, and would in turn reward the top testers with t-shirts, mugs and so forth.

I find this solution extremely brilliant. I am a Yelp elite member and I would submit my reviews for Yelp, I admit, for nothing other than the “Elite” badge on my profile page and the occasional get-togethers they have for the elite squad. That and I want to give shout out’s to the mom and pop shops in my neighborhood. I am sure that the front end community would love Resig’s idea of letting them help out. It’s a mix of wikipedia/open source testing/Yelp paradigm all in one.

The site is TestSwarm.com and will be available at the end of the month.

All packed for SXSW with my Leica, my Kindle and my favorite scarf du jour!

SXSW Interactive 2009 conference starts tomorrow, and I’m ready to go. Don’t forget to check out A Conversation with Col Needham on Monday, March 16th at 3:30pm and Cloud Computing: Defending the Undefinable on Tuesday, March 17th at 10am. Meanwhile, you can catch me tomorrow at How to Rawk SXSW at 3:30pm and then later at The Tech Set Meet the Rat Pack at The Belmont Lounge. Feel free to come up and say hi. I’d love to meet you. See you there!

The parent company that I work for has a mentorship program.  I’ve worked for a few companies, but my current company is the only one that has a program like this.  When I found out about it, I signed up to be a mentee immediately.  I knew right away what kind of mentor I was looking for: a female engineer, more seasoned than I, been with the company longer than I, work out of the main campus of the company and not mind mentoring someone remotely.  This is a tall order, I realized, and I was really lucky to have found one who fits my wishlist.  More importantly, she chose to accept me as a mentee!

One of the things that she said on our last phone call struck me as a really good advice, and I really want to share with you what it is.  The economy faces an unfortunate sharp downturn right now, and a lot of companies are downsizing.  Rather than looking at this as a setback, she reminded me that engineers should look at this as an opportunity.  Right now is the perfect time to inventorize one’s technical skills and traits, and address areas that need to be strengthened.  Take the time to educate yourself.  Know what your strengths are and how to market yourself, but also take the time to educate yourself on areas you need to work on.  When the market goes up again, which it inevitably will, you will be ready to pounce on the opportunities when other are still recoiling from this economic downturn.  You will be ahead of the pack.  I think her advice is brilliant.  Just as now is the time to re-assess one’s financial portfolio, we should assess our technical portfolio as well.  There really is no better day than today.