Being an Unremarkable Content Creator

From time to time I get asked why I named this blog “uneremarkabletester” or why my Twitter handler is “unremarkableQA”. The first reason is obviously lack of any knowledge of good branding principles. The second one is that I strongly believe that not all of us are remarkable at what we do but it is […]

Balancing Between Stream-Aligned and Enabling Teams

Over the years, swinging back and forth between positions, I found myself often thinking of Charity Major’s The Engineer/Manager Pendulum blog post. The best frontline eng managers in the world are the ones that are never more than 2-3 years removed from hands-on work, full time down in the trenches. The best individual contributors are the […]

Two Things I Practised in 2021

As the year is coming to an end, I started looking back at the things that helped me in my day-to-day work in 2021. I found that two particular ideas were always in the back of my head, stirring my actions and improving what I did. Thought I shared them in case they can help […]

Overcoming the Fear of Talking to Users

When I got my first position as a product owner, it didn’t take me long to start contacting our users. I was eager to find out what they were doing and how our tool could benefit them. My calendar was full of meetings and there were more opportunities to explore than the day was long. […]

Small Wins: The Little Things that Make our Days

Every now and then, I like taking note of all the small things that make my days at work a bit better.

Returning to the Office

A couple of weeks ago I went back to the office after 14 months. Entering the building I met two colleagues I talk to on the phone all the time. And yet, meeting them in flesh and blood I had no idea what to say. I mumbled something weird and quickly rushed to my desk. […]

Etiquette: Declining Work Meetings

Since I started working as a Product Owner last year, the quantity of meetings that I needed to participate in increased exponentially. In the beginning I accepted every meeting request without a second thought. But as time went by, I realised that going to every meeting without thinking of the implications was not only un-productive […]

On Working and Blogging

I created this blog a little more than 2 years ago, when I was on parental leave to take care of my second child. Unlike my firstborn, this little one would eat and sleep well without any major drama which gave me enough time to do other things besides household chores. A year later I […]

Testing in Babel or Experiences from Testing in a Foreign Language

The situation where development and management don’t speak the “same language” is something that many of us have faced one time or another. But what happens if you are a tester and literally don’t speak the same language as the rest of the people around you? I first started working as a software tester 3 […]

How Being Lazy in School Helped Me in Testing

I was always a good student. Never excellent, but good enough not to get any complaints from home. Not to be misunderstood, it was not only my parents pushing me to have good grades. I liked being a good student, I would just never make any extra effort to become the best one. My high […]