Earlier in the year I took my idea for a ‘mindmap based test idea management app’ all the way to the finals of Ignite Durham. And while I didn’t win, one of the judges was the founder and CEO of a local (like, 8 minute walk from the house local) tech startup, 360incentives.com and so I followed him on twitter and then promptly forgot I did it.

Until that is he advertised a ‘QA’ role [now ‘testing’] and while I didn’t really want to give up consulting we did come to an arrangement of three days a week. It turns out, I suck at working somewhere part-time and being able to ‘punch out’ at the allotted hours. Or at least somewhere there are fun challenges to solve. [Heh, and oh boy are there ever!]

There are a few more twists-and-turns to the tale, but the end of it is that as of this past Monday I am the ‘Software Delivery Manager’ at 360incentives.com. Which is kinda a made-up title we came up with the encompass the various things I was doing. The job description focuses on;

  • Manage delivery of software products from development into production
  • Manage team Software Testers to test all product changes and new features, including development of automated test suites
  • Champion software delivery best practices, such as continuous delivery, automated testing and operations automation, and work to continuously improve the team’s software delivery capabilities
  • Work with Product Management, Development and Operations teams to identify requirements, design new features, estimate development efforts and deliver on product roadmap
  • Work with Operations team to deploy and support production systems

Essentially, Element 34’s consulting practice — but for a single entity.

Which brings us to some business related FAQ-y stuff.

  • How will this affect existing support contracts? – It likely won’t. I’ll still turnaround email responses within a couple hours, and any larger code samples / upgrades will be done in the evenings or weekends. Which is when a lot of them were anyways
  • Are you taking new clients? – Likely not. But the Clarity.fm stuff will still be active if you want to chat around a very specific problem you are experiencing
  • What about Saunter? – Saunter will absolutely continue to exist and I have some interesting things planned for it. We’ll be using it at 360 as well. Though there would be some hilarity in using something else.

It should be an interesting ride as we change a monolithic, hand deployed application into a nimble continuous delivery-ed one. The question though is, who really won the Ignite contest now?

(Oh, and if you’re a devops-y minded person who knows both Windows and Linux and live in the Eastern GTA please get in tour — we’re hiring!)