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Sid is our QA Analyst who has been at HomeStars since July 2018. A lover of dad jokes and a good mystery, when not in the office Sid can be found binge-watching the latest detective series or dreaming up how Jurassic Park could work today. Meet Sid by learning more about him below.
What is your role at HomeStars?
As a QA Analyst or Quality Assurance Analyst, I am responsible for ensuring that our website maintains a specific standard of quality. That means a low number of bugs or issues for our end customers. This also means making sure that all the work that the engineering team does passes some sort of validation or verification so we know that as an engineering team we have met the requirements that we had set out to achieve.
So typically when I am testing the website, I try to make sure that I am able to answer two fundamental questions: Are we building the right product? and, Are we building the product right? To be able to answer these questions I run a series of tests to make sure the answer is what we want. This may include manual tests or creating automation checks and even exploratory tests.
Right now is an interesting time as we are building a new leads distribution system using service-oriented architecture, so always learning something new every day.
What makes you excited to come to work every day?
Knowing that we are working towards bringing out new features on our web and mobile applications that strive to improve the lives and overall experience of our end customers.
How do you stay up to date within your evolving industry?
Staying up to date in the Tech industries can be hard. Fortunately, as Toronto is becoming a tech hub there are multiple seminars, workshops, and conferences year-round, so I try to go to ones that I think are interesting. You can just find details on them online. Also, there are tons, and I mean TONS, of good resources that are available online, so it is not so difficult to learn about technologies and try to keep up to date.
What is your proudest HomeStars moment?
A proud personal moment certainly was being nominated and selected as Employee of the Month. Most of the time I feel much prouder whenever we have a successful major release completion. This is because it’s hours of our teams’ combined work that is going out to the world to be used by our customers. This may be a bad example, but it feels like seeing a loved one go through graduation.
As a child what was your dream job?
As a child, like maybe all children, at one point I wanted to be an astronaut. Then when I realized that meant going out into outer space the dream quickly changed to become a NASA engineer.
I also wanted to be a detective that solves mysteries like Sherlock or Inspector Clouseau. You can say that I somehow do a portion of that when I do deep dives and inspect the cause of bugs and issues. So instead of becoming an inspector, I became an “issue-spector” (that was a bad joke).
Just realized that the two jobs combined would make for an amazing tv show, a NASA-engineer turned detective. Trying to solve advanced technological and interplanetary or extraterrestrial mysteries… Wait, that’s basically X-files…
What fictional place do you want to exist? Why?
Jurassic Park. Why you ask? Because it can be built right now.
Aren’t you afraid of being eaten? No, because you can just build them using animatronic dinosaurs like it was made for the movie and just make it more realistic using some Boston dynamic type tech like the robot dog or deer, and voila you got a realistic dinosaur that you can control that will never eat humans. Just don’t give it any AI. We don’t want to be fighting dinosaurs when the robots eventually rise up.
If you want to join Sid on the development team or see our other openings, be sure to check out our careers page. We can’t wait to hear from you!
