As some of you might know, I tested video games for two years at EA. I found and wrote up a lot of bugs in my time there. I think I may have written up a couple hundred bugs across four titles. Most of those bugs were eventually assigned to a software engineer to get fixed. I always wondered who got my bugs and how they went about fixing them. Despite the numerous bugs I found, I never was the one to fix the bug. I could describe what happened and even theorize the cause, but I was never in the position to do the actual work that eliminated the bug.
Today, I got my first bug assigned to me as a software engineer. It wasn’t a particularly interesting defect in the game but it was a personal milestone. I’ve come full circle in a way. The other side of the coin. The other end of the take-out window. It’s a nice feeling, though now, I gotta go figure out how to fix these damn bugs that keep getting assigned to me.
In other news, probably the only academic paper I’ll ever have my name on gets presented today in Italy at the International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI) at a poster session. One of the co-authors of our paper, Jen, will be at said session. I hope she represents us well and that she dazzles everyone with our work. Hopefully in a few weeks, our paper will be archived the ACM Digital Library.