1. It's okay to love your job
2. Sometimes you need to push yourself to progress

Back in 2016 I was placed as the tester on a brand new microservice project. I had little to no experience with API’s and frankly had no clue what Microservices were at that time.

With my dev team understanding that I was also the Test Team Leader and also Testing another product at the time they offered a choice as we were all at the start of the project…

I could test from the get-go (I’d need to get up to speed with certain tech and concepts first)
OR
I could wait until they were ready to create a front-end and then test that way

I wanted to test the latter way, that would have been much easier for me. Afterall I didn’t have the experience to really test this. Then I thought to myself – why not?
I wanted to be able to test this application from the ground up, I wanted to know everything about it’s building, structure, deployment – everything I could. So I dove in. In return my dev team pointed me in the right direction and I started getting up to speed about Docker, YAML, JSON, Rancher, MongoDB.

This was not an easy journey but I’ve become a much better tester becasue of it. This talk is to highlight that sometimes it’s the right thing to push yourself out of your comfort zone. To do more than you’re doing right now to achieve better than you have in the past. To own your craft and to dive straight in. It’s not simple but it is worth it.