racheljoi.com

We have a new tester on my team. I recruit­ed her, and I talked her up to my team. They liked her, and I was excit­ed when it worked out. She’s not new to test­ing, but she’s new to mobile,… Read morelan­guage and learn­ing

I know I talk a lot about board games, but I’ve nev­er talked about which ones are actu­al­ly good starter games for any­one inter­est­ed in build­ing a mod­ern board game col­lec­tion. So what games do you need? In no par­tic­u­lar… Read moreessen­tial board games

My hus­band won’t sing in front of me. He’s tak­ing voice lessons with a great teacher (Tyler Kofoed, if you’re inter­est­ed), and he says he’s get­ting bet­ter, but he won’t sing for me. Part of it is intim­i­da­tion, because I’ve… Read moreinse­cu­ri­ty and brav­ery

I had a real­iza­tion when I start­ed my cur­rent job: I don’t want to be indis­pens­able. For a very long time, I want­ed to be indis­pens­able, where things would come to a halt if I weren’t there or if I… Read moreindis­pens­abil­i­ty and val­ue

I went to Mind Games in April, at which judges play at least 30 games and vote on their favorites. On Sun­day morn­ing, votes are tal­lied, and five games are her­ald­ed as win­ners with the right to put the Men­sa… Read moreboard game extrav­a­gan­za 2 (April)

What con­jures thoughts of lux­u­ry to you? Nice purs­es? Hand-tai­lored suits? Expen­sive scotch? For me, yes, those are lux­u­ri­ous items, but a much sim­pler lux­u­ry item is… Gold­fish. Yeah, the cheese crack­ers shaped like fish. I still feel a lit­tle… Read morelux­u­ry and want

I went to a board game con­ven­tion at the begin­ning of March, and I played lots of games! Here’s a list: Scov­ille: This is sim­i­lar to Pas­tiche, but with pep­pers. It’s a cute game where you plant pep­pers and try… Read moreboard game extrav­a­gan­za 1 (March)

We brought Scythe home a few weeks ago, and we’ve played it a few times. We’ve played one 2‑player and two 4‑player games, and Carl played the automa ver­sion once. I think I can give a decent review of it now.… Read moreboard game review: Scythe

In the past month, I’ve done two train­ings on soft­ware test­ing: ASTQB’s Mobile Foun­da­tions course, and Sat­is­fice’s Rapid Soft­ware Test­ing Applied course. The dif­fer­ence between them was marked. Like the SQE train­ing I reviewed ear­li­er and sub­se­quent ISTQB test for… Read moretest­ing train­ings — a com­par­i­son

I joined a team at work that has moved to agile from water­fall. It was a high-per­­for­m­ing team in water­fall, and now the team is fig­ur­ing out how to get that same lev­el of per­for­mance while doing agile. It’s been… Read morea tran­si­tion to agile