I started programming in BASIC, Fortran and COBOL way back in the early 80's taking night school courses during high school. I finished the first two and got halfway through COBOL when I stated outloud, "COBOL is boring!" and stopped going. It would be many years before I went back to formally trying to learn how to program because I had learned enough to make small games on my VIC-20 and what more did I want? Then in 2000, I took a one week Visual Basic course and started to fiddle around with developing again. I quickly lost interest and stopped using it.

Things changed around 2010 while I was a QA Manager and was looking into an alternative to my team using Silk for it's automation testing. Our budget was tight and we couldn't upgrade Silk, so it became more and more unstable as time went on. This is when we decided to move away from Silk and any other costly tool and start using C# and CodedUI. We tested a windows desktop app and this is what we needed to work with. We got started on a rewrite of our automation when the company took a downturn and the automation team was disbanded. A few months later I was laid off.

Prior to being laid off, I tried to self-teach myself C#, but stumbled quite a bit. I signed up to take a semester course at the local community college and was finally able to make sense of it. Once I was laid off, I spent a great deal of time getting better at C# and Selenium focusing on Web Automation. Over the last few years, I've become fairly decent at it and now doing Mobile Automation using Python and Appium. Mobile automation is much trickier, but everything is going mobile (IMO) so this is where I need to be.

Recently, I got back to using Selenium and doing Web automation, but now using Katalon. This wasn't my choice, but started a new job and was told we need to use it. After a handful of months, I feel comfortable with the tool and it's good, but I still prefer to not be tied to it. It's basically built wrapping Selenium and Appium and using an Eclipse IDE and Java/Groovy as the language. I have a bad history getting handcuffed by tools and this is a free one (not open source) which makes me wonder how long they will support it. I guess I'll have job security when they decide to stop and I have to try to pull all the code out and start fresh. And...that's me today.