Sam Bryan

This series explores Apprenticeship Patterns by Adewale Oshineye and Dave Hoover. This week, I decided to read the apprenticeship pattern “The Deep End.”  To be completely honest, most career opportunities that are on the horizon are somewhat intimidating. I wonder if I have the ability to do a lot of the work they require. The chapter talks about getting into a rut, but my rut is working fast food. Making a transition to a career-oriented position is a big step, and it is a bit out of my comfort zone. Instead of reluctantly accepting a task that I am not confident about, I should have the self-assurance to jump in at the deep end. This gives me permission to take on a task that might seem daunting when it presents itself. This is easier said than done, and I find it hard to entirely  abandon my initial timidness. It is important to note that they also warn about getting too far out of your depth. It is okay to jump in the deep end, but “you still need to rememb...

https://joecolantonio.com/testtalks/223-testing-dream-journaling-smashing-sand-castles-with-noemi-ferrera/ In this blog for software quality assurance and testing, I decided to return to the “Test Talks” podcast, presented by Joe Colantonio, for another episode (#223). In it, he sat down with Noemi Ferrera, a software tester for a Chinese mobile gaming company to get her take on the subject. Noemi gave a few interesting metaphors that I appreciated for how to look at testing. In one, she gave the example of going to a movie where you had already read the book. It was different than how you imagined it while reading it, and testing is a way of making the “movie version” fit the way you envisioned it playing out.  The other metaphor for testing that she gave was, if you were children at the beach, the developers would be the ones building the sandcastles, whereas the testers would be the ones destroying them. I don’t know if that would be the most accurate way of lookin...

For this week’s blog on software design, I chose to watch a video presented by Dr. Steve Bagley on some fundamentals of object oriented programming (OOP). I’m embarrassed to say that although I am taking several upper-level computer science classes, I am unsure I would be able to give a good definition of what object oriented design was. To be fair though, it has been several years since I have taken CS 101, and it seemed like such a foreign concept at the time. I felt silly learning about something so elementary again, but it made a lot more sense when I’ve had as much exposure to OOP as I have now. For the video, he uses a game of “Pong” as an example of how OOP might use objects to represent the “ball” and “paddles.” From there, he talked some about inheritance and touched on a few more topics, albeit briefly. The main reason why I didn’t understand the benefit of this way of programming is that I didn’t know how else you would do it. I didn’t realize that without declari...