Alexander Tarlinder wrote his first computer program around the age of ten, sometime in the early nineties. It was a simple, text-based role playing game for the Commodore 64. It had lots of GOTO statements and an abundance of duplicated code. Still, to him, this was the most fantastic piece of software ever conceived, and an entry point to his future career.
Twenty-five years later, Alexander still writes code and remains a developer at heart. Today, his professional career stretches over 15 years, a time during which he has shouldered a variety of roles: developer, architect, project manager, ScrumMaster, tester, and agile coach. In all these roles, he has gravitated towards sustainable pace, craftsmanship, and attention to quality, and he eventually got test infected around 2005. In a way, this was inevitable, since many of his projects involved programming money somehow (in the banking and gaming industry), and he always felt that he could do more to ensure the quality of his code before handing it over to someone else.
Presently, Alexander seeks roles that allow him to influence the implementation process on a larger scale. He combines development projects with training and coaching, and he shares technical and nontechnical aspects of developer testing and quality assurance in conferences and local user groups meetings.