jessenoller.com

So, time to start some­thing I’ve been mean­ing to do on an actual blog for months — start cov­er­ing who I am.

I’m hop­ing to cover all the “impor­tant bases” (as if telling the inter­net about myself is “impor­tant” — I don’t think the inter­net cares, really), but I’ll chunk it up into semi-palatable pieces if needed.

I’m a 25 year old Geek. There — I’ve said it. I work for a tech startup in Waltham, MA as a SQA (Senior QA Engi­neer), work­ing with Python, Linux, and other inter­est­ing things, some of which it’s not very appro­pri­ate to chat about. I play video games (right now — World of War­craft) and I enjoy read­ing about tech issues around stor­age sys­tems, dis­trib­uted sys­tem, Linux, Python, and Mac.

I live with my fiance Dusty, out in cen­tral MA with three cats. We plan on doing the mar­ry­ing thing next year — all sorts of good stuff in that area. Our land­lord is the best land­lord in exis­tence, and the neigh­bor­hood is won­der­ful. A++ would rent again. Our cats are atten­tion whores I some­times think are try­ing to make a busi­ness by cov­er­ing all of my cloth­ing, com­put­ers and cig­ars with cat hair.

I’m also a bit of a Mac Zealot — (Ok, more than a bit) I con­verted to the Mac plat­form last November/December as part of a gen­eral dis­gust of Linux on the desk­top, and Win­dows. I’ve never liked Win­dows, except to play games, and I’ve been using Linux for years, but I got addicted to OS/X late last year, sold off all my Win/Lin boxes and con­verted, never look­ing back. The rea­son I say zealot, is that fre­quently — con­verts make the best zealots, and I am a true convert.

My “favorite” pro­gram­ming lan­guage is Python. It’s the one I’m best in (I’m try­ing to learn Java) and the one I use the most. I spend most of my work day hack­ing on Python code for var­i­ous projects, and one day I hope to push out a few open-source appli­ca­tions in Python.

Python Python Python. Whereas I might be a Mac Zealot, I am also a Python zealot. Not in the “you must use Python for every­thing” (I strongly believe in using the right tool for the right job) sense, but more in the “Python just Works” sense. So far, I’ve made a few con­verts to my addic­tion, by show­ing them the ease of use, sim­plic­itly and strengths of Python.

I don’t want to give a reader a mis­taken idea that I am off the deep end obsessed — I’m not. Again, I’ve a very large pro­po­nent of using the right tool for the right job, and stay­ing practical.

The lat­ter state­ment is a per­son­al­ity flaw of sorts. If I don’t see the prac­ti­cal­ity of a solu­tion address­ing a real prob­lem, I imme­di­ately begin to dis­man­tle the solu­tion in the most crit­i­cal way pos­si­ble. I’ve toned it down in recent years, but it always causes prob­lems when and if I don’t see the entire pic­ture, and begin to argue and dis­man­tle things in a given situation.

Prac­ti­cal­ity. Does the tool does some­thing needed? Does the test actu­ally test some­thing use­ful? Does the prod­uct work in a func­tional, prac­ti­cal way with­out requir­ing the user to jump through hoops? Is it easy to use, to setup? I guess those ques­tions are what make me a pass­able QA Engineer.

In any case — before I go off the deep end any­more, other than com­put­ers, I have a few things that keep me occu­pied. I enjoy cigar smok­ing (real cig­ars, not cheap ones) — wines, video games. The usual for a 25 year old in this day and age I guess. As of late, my other girl­friend has been World of Warcraft.

So between Python hack­ing and Work — which takes up some 12–13 hours a day for me, I split my time up with my Fiance, and pid­dling around on World of War­craft. I keep mean­ing to cut back on the lat­ter — it’s been some time since I’ve given myself enough time to sit down and soak up a good book — but video games pro­vide a nice numb expe­ri­ence that help decom­press after star­ing at code and stack traces all day.

What am I going to use this blog for? I don’t know — prob­a­bly to talk about Python and Macs, to be hon­est. That’s what I intended it to be. We’ll see how all that goes, now won’t we?

So, time to start some­thing I’ve been mean­ing to do on an actual blog for months — start cov­er­ing who I am. I’m hop­ing to cover all the “impor­tant bases” (as...