The Night Before the
Proposal Deadline
By Moss Drake
The office was dark except for my laptop,
The deadline for PNSQC proposals soon would drop.
With the Call for Proposals page loaded in Chrome
I needed an idea before I could go home.
It seemed so easy to write a good abstract:
A title, a problem, my solution, some facts.
But I realized before I could write one single line
I needed a topic, a spark, a passion of mine.
Scaling Quality, they said, was the theme this year.
So I reflected on what I’d been working on here.
Sally in DevOps did a brown bag on automation.
Could I enlist her as a partner in presentation?
Or that knotty problem, unit testing spaghetti code,
Working with legacy is starting to get old.
I read a book about refactoring for testing
But that’s not what I’m best in.
My boss was asking about moving to the cloud
I wondered, would anyone want to hear it out loud?
In Spring we workshopped a new agile trick
The team liked it, but it failed to stick.
Maybe the psychology of habits and workflow
Is a paper that I can make go?
Sometimes the best ideas come from the worst bit.
Forbes said “Failure is success if we learn from it.”
That project we had that crashed and burned
Might make a good summary of lessons learned.
But that’s a large topic, maybe too big for a paper.
Maybe I’d talk with Joe about that later.
I made a mental note to start earlier tho’
Our brainstorm sessions really help the thoughts flow.
How I admired Lucy’s presentation on testing with stubs and proxies
Using Chef, AWS and a dash of new technologies.
The message was broad enough I could use myself
While learning some of the tools on her shelf.
And then–
Inspiration hit as I wrote some lines and filled in the title.
It could work if I tweaked it a little.
The lessons learned and takeaways fell into place,
And a smile of contentment covered my face.
For some, ideas are like potato chips, you can’t have just one.
But I can’t tell whether they’re good until I share ’em
So I decided to write of my own personal journey
A project of mine involving Scaling Quality.
