The concept of Quality and my 'mission'

Andrew Bolster

Senior R&D Manager (Data Science) at Synopsys Software Integrity Group and Treasurer @ Bsides Belfast and NI OpenGovernment Network

I’ve been reading the fantastic ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainance’, and it is simply fantastic on any level. This isn’t a sales pitch, but it got me thinking and what I have been trying to accomplish with a range of projects and attitudes over the years.

I want to cultivate higher Quality people. I want to contribute to people’s development and growth. I want to do this for the pure and simple reason that, to me, individual change is the only path to long-term change and cultural improvement.

If anyone has ever looked at my coding, they will know that I’m not exactly an authority on Quality, but regardless; Farset Labs is my way to be a mentor/sounding board/reality check for a wider sector of the community, the same way that I had people like Ben Harrison, Alastair McKinley, Alan Marshall, and Steve Orr to occasionally beat the living shit out of me provide strong, honest, reviews of my work and ideas, and to act not as silent assessors, which is probably what they should have done, but instead to contribute their vast collective experiences to my own development. Those people fundamentally and individually changed my life. Whether that’s for the better or not is for history to decide, but I know that I’m a higher ‘quality’ person for having them be part of my story.

It would be entirely relevant to put together some blurb about Maslow, Gandhi, etc, but the long story short is that no amount of ‘big plans’ and mass-market solutions will have the long term effect that personalised, individualised, Quality, passed on through friends, neighbours, enemies, strangers, and family.

Be Excellent to Each-other. Now I’m going to go and punt out some Quality, low-quality code…

Published: July 20 2012

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