Thursday, December 14, 2006

Senator Tim Johnson Conspiracy Theories

Well, I just checked google, and there aren't any conspiracy theories that have yet surfaced about Senator Johnson. I certainly wish him well, both for his own sake, and for the sake of the country.

Just seems to me that we should check him for any Polonium that George W. Putin, or one of his minions, left lying around.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Employment opportunities redux

Here's an excerpt from an email I sent to a friend who was telling me that she didn't want to commute quite as far as Los Gatos for a job:
Anyway, if you *were* working, and there was anyone that you'd want to have on your team again, let me know who they are. They're not necessarily even traditional QA people. Anyone who is smart, curious and diligent, and who understands how computers work qualifies.

I'm trying to build a different brand of QA. It's the java engineers who are ultimately responsible for the correctness, completeness and scalability of their product -- you can't test in any of those attributes. All QA can do is assess whether those attributes exist and advise the developers on any significant lack.

I'm not looking for someone who knows silktest or loadrunner or even jUnit inside and out. I want someone who can understand the fact that our business is driven by three things: 1. customers can sign up, 2. customers can add movies to their queue, 3. customers get discs shipped to them

Everything else is just syntactic sugar that dresses up our core semantics.

So, as I've mentioned before, I'm looking for a couple of people who are interested in addressing the issue of software quality at Netflix, and I'm NOT looking for a browser-poker or someone who dreams up test cases for an offshore outfit to throw warm bodies at.

If you want to help us run with scissors, apply

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Free Blockbuster Rentals for Netflix Customers

On HackingNetflix there is an article about being able to take the address flap from your Netflix rental envelope into a Blockbuster store and getting a free rental. I wonder if BBI is harvesting the addresses for targeted direct mail campaigns? That free movie might not only be costing you the gas to drive there, but it might cost you a bunch of future junk mail, too.