Welcome

My first post--and an answer to the question: "Why yet another tech blog?"

First off, let me introduce myself.   My name's Dan, and I test software.   I started off in commercial software testing at Claris, testing FileMaker Pro in the early 1990s.  Then I moved on to be test manager for Internet Explorer for Mac during the browser wars, before moving to the Microsoft TV group in 1999. 
In 2003 I moved to the Microsoft Commerce Server team as test manager, and served in that role (with a short gap) until late 2009.

Since then, I felt a need to do something different, something technical, something more fun than working on Windows and the Microsoft stack of software.   It's fine for what it does, but all of that Microsoft stack is so heavily oriented towards corporate IT users, and frankly I wanted to do something more fun and personally rewarding than working on SharePoint powered web sites--developing yet another web part for reviews and ratings or another dashboard component measuring some KPI just didn't sound enticing.

And thus... I left the Microsoft world.  Now, I"m really enjoying getting to know the Linux world--it's a whole new candy store of new tools and exciting goodies.  I last used Unix almost 20 years ago, long before things like wget or even really HTTP, so while things have certainly changed they've also remained the same.

So that's one of the major points of this blog: to document all the learnings as I make my way along this path, as I migrate and transition from Windows development world to a Linux development world.   It's fun, and exciting... and I want to share what's happening with whoever happens upon this blog.

Enjoy!