10 karma · joined July 9, 2020
The thing I will ding Asus about is serviceability. It's easy enough to remove the screws to take the bottom panel off, but there was always one screw for NVME/Wifi that had so much loctite that I ended up needing a special pair of plyers to remove.
- Thinkpad workstation laptop provided by work
- One desktop running Windows 11 (gaming/development)
- One laptop dual booting Windows 11 and Fedora (gaming/development)
- Surface Laptop Studio running Windows 11 (content consumption, light development)
- Surface Pro X (previous content consumption device. I'll sell it "someday")
- Samsung Galaxy Tab 7+ (mobile gaming, content consumption)
I also compulsively switch out my laptops/tablets on a yearly basis...I have a problem.
Another thing to consider is that while medications can improve your quality of life, they're only part of the solution. I see a therapist weekly and a coach for ADHD on and off throughout the year. I have to exercise regularly or else my anxiety and depression become unbearable. It's hard work, but I know that consequences of not doing those things are far worse. In my case, my medications don't solve my depression and anxiety. What they do is bring me up enough that I can keep moving forward and keep improving, with the hope that one day I will untangle the mess of emotions and I may not need them anymore.
You mentioned that you've tried therapy. Did you stop because you felt better or because you didn't have a good rapport with your therapist? This is just my experience, but it took 2-3 years before my therapist and I were able to tear down all of the defenses I put up for decades. I'm at year 7 and I'm finally starting to push through some of my own behaviors and stories I tell myself to make progress and take back control of parts of my life I thought I had no control over.
I can't tell you what you should do. What I will say with absolutely certainty is that it is not weakness to want help. It is not weak to want to live a productive life. I would talk to your doctor about what you're experiencing to have another opinion about your situation. Medication for some people is the complete answer, but that's not always the case. I would strongly encourage you to find a therapist that you have a good rapport with and stay with them. Once again, at least in my case, the medications balanced me enough to deal with my mental health issues. Dealing with depression takes a lot of time and energy, but now I know the issues I'm really fighting, I don't feel helpless anymore. Take care of yourself. You are worthy of having a good life.
In one situation I ran into a team who was very frustrated with their automation because it was so slow. After a bit of investigation, I found out they were setting up all of their test data through database migrations, which were 10+ minutes slow. I asked why they weren't using the API to setup test data, to which they replied that none of them had experience with the API. After hacking away it in my spare time for a few weeks, I had a perfectly functional API client, and the tests were converted over time out of using the migrations.
I saw this the other day, and while it might sound cheesy, but someone said that QA to them was "quality acceleration", which actually fits fairly well. I have never worked at a company who had enough testers to go around. Keeping a smaller group of centralized testers to handle the really tough technical challenges, and a larger group of embedded testers who evangelize on testing practices was the most successful approach.
In this case, I wouldn't say you absolutely need a full quality team, but having some folks whose primary focus is testing and test automation to help skill up your dev teams sounds reasonable.