Making Things Blow Up
Michael Hunter
Employer: Microsoft
Job: Technical Lead
DDJ: What does "Technical Lead" mean?
MH: A couple of things. The first is that I figure out how to do what needs to be done—looking at things like the test infrastructure, as well as how well we do the testing that we need to do.
DDJ: What do you like about your job?
MH: Well, I get to test all day, which is great. You know, making things blow up is always fun.
DDJ: What do you find challenging about your job?
MH: Thinking about how best to test things. I work on Microsoft Expression, which is a suite of designer tools. And it's not like some API [where] you just write a bunch of little programs to bang on those APIs. We're doing stuff on the screen, so we have to figure out how to automate all those user actions in a way that is sustainable and easy to maintain, and faster than just doing all that testing manually. That's been a challenge.
