It was June 8th,1974 and on a warm evening in the territory of Amapá, now a state in the northern part of Brazil, a baby boy was born. Other than being a couple of months premature, the one thing that made this birth a bit more interesting than any premature birth was the fact that this baby had its hands and feet completely bent inwards, almost fused into his arms and legs.

The last time I wrote about Quality Engineering, I mentioned that some of the reasons why people are not familiar with this term are, in no particular order: 'Quality' is usually something that is added as an after thought and doesn't really come into the picture, if ever, until the very end of the release process Nobody outside of a QA team really knows what they do. It has something to do with testing.

Whenever I meet someone for the first time, after we get past the initial niceties typically involved when you meet someone for the first time, eventually the conversation shifts to work and what one does for a living. Inevitably I'm faced with what, at a first glance, may sound like a simple question and the conversation goes like this: New acquaintance: "What do you do at Red Hat?" Me: "I manage a team of quality engineers for a couple of different products.

This week I started reading On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King, a book that has been mentioned a few times by people I usually interview for my weekly podcast as something that is both inspiring and has had a major impact on their lives and careers. After the third or forth time someone mentioned I finally broke down and got myself a copy at the local bookstore.

For someone who has run his own podcast for several years (albeit not generating a lot of content lately), it took me quite some time to actually start listening to podcasts myself. Ironic, I know, but I guess the main reason behind this was because I was always reading code at work and eventually, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't pay attention to what was being said! No matter how interesting the topic being discussed was or how engaging the hosts (or hosts) were, my brain would be so focused on reading code that everything else just turned into white noise.

Another year has gone by and I guess it is time to review the things I set out to do and grade myself on how well (or poorly) I fared. Here are some of my goals for 2015: Read 70 Books Grade: PASS Even though I had a very, very busy year at work, with many releases of Red Hat Satellite 5 and Red Hat Satellite 6 shipped to our customers, I managed to surpass my goal of reading 70 books, finishing the year with a whopping 79 books read!

{.align-left} Read Selected Short Stories by Franz Kafka (review) Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (review) A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby (review) Buddha, Vol. 1\: Kapilavastu by Osamu Tezuka (review) The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi (review) Reading Billy Budd and Other Stories by Herman Melville Gift Auto da Compadecida by Ariano Suassuma O Lustre by Clarice Lispector O Santo Inquerito by Dias Gomes Dona Sinha e o Filho Padre by Gilberto Freire A Moreninha by Joaquim Manuel de Macedo Todos os Nomes by Jose Saramago O Guarani by Jose de Alencar War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Contos Fluminenses by Machado de Assis Helena by Machado de Assis Quincas Borda by Machado de Assis Bufo & Spallanzani by Rubem Fonseca O Buraco na Parece by Rubem Fonseca Seize the Day by Saul Bellow As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner