Chapter 2 · Page 1
About Me
Quality.
Quality isn’t something we test in. It’s something we build in.
To me, quality isn’t a checklist. It’s a mindset: the standards I
hold myself to, the way I treat people, and the choices I make when no one’s
checking my work. That mindset followed me into software testing, and eventually
became a career. I don’t see QA as just finding bugs. It’s
understanding how something is supposed to work, questioning what could go wrong,
and helping the people building it make it better.
Roots
That perspective was shaped long before I got into technology. I was born and
raised in Utah, carrying both Filipino and British heritage. My mother immigrated
to the U.S. from the Philippines with little more than grit and gratitude. My
father, a psychologist who later reinvented himself as a software developer,
passed away in 2014 from multiple myeloma. Watching the people around me adapt to
hard circumstances taught me something I still carry: life doesn’t always
give you control over what happens, but you always have control over what you do
next. That’s shaped who I am, and how I approach the work.
Utah, and the Questions I Keep Asking
I’ve always been curious about how things work. Whether I’m building
something, fixing something, or taking something apart, I tend to ask the same
question: “Why does it work this way?”
That mindset has followed me into QA. I don’t just want to know that
something works. I want to understand why it works, how it behaves when things
don’t go as planned, and what we can do to make it better. I think that
curiosity is one of the most important parts of quality.
The People Who Shaped Me
My grandmother was one of the people I admired most: sharp intelligence paired
with hard-earned wisdom, the kind that comes from living through hard chapters
without letting them define you.
Learn, Earn, Return
“There are three parts to your life. One part you learn, the other part you
earn, the next part you return.”
/ Denzel Washington
I try to live in all three at once, not take them in turns. I’m still
learning constantly: new tools, new AI-assisted workflows, new ways to
think about quality. I earn through the work itself. And I return it by
mentoring the next wave of QA engineers, many of whom I met back when I was
still figuring this out myself. Doing all three at the same time, instead of
waiting your turn for each one, is what actually opens doors of opportunity.
Habits I Try to Live By
Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a
framework I keep coming back to, not because I’ve mastered it, but
because it’s a good measuring stick:
- Be Proactive
- Begin with the End in Mind
- Put First Things First
- Think Win-Win
- Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood
- Synergize
- Sharpen the Saw
A few of these show up directly in how I work: seeking to understand before
being understood is half of what makes someone good at QA, thinking win-win is
what makes cross-team collaboration actually hold up, and sharpening the saw is
why I’m still learning new tools years into this career instead of
coasting on what I already know.
Other Great Reads
A few more books that have shaped how I think, about myself and about people.
No Bad Parts
Richard C. Schwartz, PhD
An introduction to Internal Family Systems: the idea that the mind is made
up of many “parts,” and that even the most disruptive ones are
trying to protect you, not sabotage you.
Atomic Habits
James Clear
A practical framework for building better habits through small, compounding
changes instead of sweeping overhauls.
The Mountain Is You
Brianna Wiest
A look at self-sabotage: why we get in our own way, and how to turn that
resistance into self-mastery.
Don’t Believe Everything You Think
Joseph Nguyen
A short, direct case that most of our suffering comes not from our
circumstances, but from the constant narration of our own thoughts.
Team Building
I love the teams I get to build with, and I try to prove it outside the standup
too: I’m always looking for the next reason to get a team out of the office
and into something a little more adventurous together.
Skydiving with the QA Team
Legrand
A Legrand photo of the local QA engineers who went skydiving together with me.
Quality is built on trust, and there’s no faster way to build it with a team
than jumping out of a plane together.
ConexED Summit at Grand America
ConexED · Grand America
A ConexED team summit at the Grand America hotel: we ate together, ran through
team-building exercises, and networked with high-end educators from around Utah
to explore new ways to improve education for students across the board.
Floating the Provo River with Seekwell
Seekwell
A Seekwell team outing floating down the Provo River, taking in Utah’s
natural landscape while working to stay together as one unit the whole way down:
a simple team-building exercise that says a lot about how well a team
communicates.
Manners Maketh Man
Kingsman: The Secret Service is, hands down, my favorite movie. Not for
the gadgets or the tailoring, but for the story underneath it: a kid nobody
expected much from, given a real shot by someone who saw more in him than he saw
in himself, and held to a standard higher than the one he grew up with. That’s
a story that has always felt close to home.
The line Harry Hart lives by, “Manners maketh man,” is the one
I’ve carried the longest in my own fight for quality. It’s not really
about etiquette. It’s the reminder that every quality action is also a
choice: I can find the bug, ship the fix, raise the standard, and still choose to
be kind and mannerful to the people on the other side of that work. Quality
isn’t only in what we build. It’s in how we treat the people we build
it with.
That’s the standard I hold myself to: not just capital-Q Quality in the
work, but manners maketh man in how I get there.