Hello and welcome to my little corner of the Internet! I am really excited to be starting my first blog.
I've always been interested in blogging, but have never got around to it due to time constraints and fear that I'd run out of things to say. Now that blogging is a requirement for my Gnome FOSS Outreach Program for Women internship, I no longer have those excuses. In fact, I have a perfect subject to write about as the Outreach Program for Women internship provides me with a lot of built-in material to focus on. I will be blogging mainly about the project I will be doing for the the internship which is Visual Editor Browser Test Automation for the Wikimedia Foundation. Here is my proposal for the project.
A little bit about me: My name is Rachel, and I live outside of Boston, MA with my husband and our two children. I have a BS in Mathematics, and Minor in Computer Science from SUNY Albany, and many years experience working in the IT field at various positions. These
include Linux System Administration, Release Engineer, QA tester and
Technical Support Engineer. I have been a volunteer for the Wikimedia Foundation Quality Assurance automation group since January helping them with Browser Test Automation in an effort to gain more Quality Assurance experience. When I was told about the OPW internship, I was quite interested as it seemed to be right up my alley. I applied, and am thrilled that I was one of the candidates chosen. Here is a little more about me.
I will be updating here at least every two weeks, but hopefully more often that that. I would like to discuss the technical aspects of the project, but hopefully in a way that everyone can follow, even without much knowledge of test automation or coding. We are using some interesting, cutting edge tools such as Cucumber, Ruby, and Page Objects that I hope to blog more about. As part of my internship I may be doing volunteer coordination for the Quality Assurance automation group at the Wikimedia Foundation, so I hope to talk about that as well. I also would like to blog about other topics that this project and internship touch on, such as quality assurance, Open Source, and women in technology.
Did I mention how excited I am to be part of the Outreach Program for Women, working on such a great project? This internship that will give me the opportunity to learn QA test automation in depth, and to help out with the open source cause at the same time. I want to give a big "thank you" to all the amazing people that have gotten me to this point today. A big thanks to Karen Sandler and Marina Zhurakhinskaya for running OPW, and to Quim Gill for coordinating the OPW at the Wikimedia Foundation. Many thanks to Chris McMahon and Zeljko Filipin for being such incredible mentors, and going above and beyond to get me started in QA automation, and for helping me during the application process for the OPW internship. I am looking forward to having a great summer as an OPW intern!
