Why I Stepped Back, and the Reason I'm Back

For a few years I shared far less in public, even though the work itself never stopped. The honest story of why I stepped back, and how I came back on my own terms.

Hi. It has been a while.

A few years ago, I went quiet here. No posts. No videos. No conference talks. No steady LinkedIn updates. I slowly stepped away from the version of me that was always sharing, teaching, speaking, and showing the work as it happened.

If it looked like I had stopped, I understand why.

But I had not stopped.

I was still testing. Still building. Still learning. Still answering questions. Still doing the work. I had only stopped doing it out loud.

This is the story of why I pulled back, what was happening behind the scenes, and why I am coming back now on different terms.

Let me start with what I love, because it is the whole reason any of this matters to me.

When I was younger, I wanted to be a teacher, and sharing what I know turned out to be my version of that. I have a way of taking hard, technical ideas and breaking them down so that someone can actually learn from them and grow, and that is the part I am most passionate about. I have run bootcamps for people coming into tech, including people without a degree, and I watched a lot of them become real QA testers. I still hear from some of them today. Few things make me prouder. It feels like my contribution, my way of holding the door open for someone else.

Conferences were that same joy. I loved meeting people, hearing what they had to share, learning their stories and the way they think. You learn so much in a room like that. It is a wealth of knowledge and community and building alongside other people, and I genuinely loved every part of it. And I learn as much as I share. If no one ever passes on what they figured out, none of us grow.

So why did I pull back

Because doing it well takes more than people realize, and I hold whatever I put out to a standard.

Writing is the fastest way for me to share something. Not the easy way, there is always back and forth to get a piece right, but the fastest. Because I am a big reader, putting things into words comes more naturally to me, so getting a written piece out simply takes less than getting a video out.

Video is a different world. For one video, you have to:

Remember to record it, and record your screen while you work.
Keep track of the exact steps, so you can actually walk someone through them.
Screenshot everything, because you will want it later.
Maybe show your face.
Write and record a voiceover.
Make the graphics, and find a way to hook people in the first few seconds.
Go back through the whole thing and cut the rough parts so it flows.
Shape what is left so it is clear and nobody walks away with the wrong idea.
Watch it back, which means hearing your own voice, and mine still makes me cringe.
Make the thumbnail and the end screen, and set up the subscribe prompt.
And so many more things.

That is just video. Talking at conferences is a whole separate world again, where a single set of slides can take weeks to put together. On top of all of it, I was doing AMAs, those ask-me-anything sessions, and just about every other way I could find to share. I was traveling to speak in different places, all while holding down a full job.

I am also an introvert, which surprises people. As much as I love this community, a full day around hundreds of people leaves me running on empty. At TestBash in Manchester I gave three sessions and loved every minute, and I was so glad of the quiet room they set aside, somewhere to slip away and get my energy back between them.

Then there is the pressure I put on myself. I was holding all of this to my own high standard while doing a demanding job, building my own projects, and living a full life. I kept telling myself the next post had to be out and the next video had to be ready, and when I missed the deadlines I set for myself, I was hard on myself about it. Bit by bit, the thing I loved most started to feel like a weight. Something that used to bring me joy became something I quietly dreaded. And the work does not even end when you press publish, because then you are replying, connecting, keeping the conversation going. All of it was only ever one piece of my life. Sharing was never my main job. I did it because I love it. So when it started taking more than it gave back, I stepped away to protect it. That made me sad, but I needed to.

Here is the part I want to be clear about, though. I never stopped the work itself. I was still a QA, still building, still learning, and still helping the people who messaged me directly when they needed a hand. None of that went anywhere, because it is not something I clock out of. It is who I am. I just stopped narrating it.

Then I was laid off

After all of that, life handed me something I did not choose. I was laid off, after ten years at the same company. It was tied to the wider economic climate that so many people are living through, the same wave of cuts that has moved across our industry. Knowing it was not personal did not make the morning it happened feel any less personal.

The hard part was not really the layoff. It was everything after. I spent a couple of months job hunting, and it is humbling work:

Rebuilding a resume and sending out application after application.
Sitting through one interview after another.
Running into a wall I did not expect. I live in Jamaica, and a lot of roles quietly want someone in a particular country or time zone, so you can be exactly the right person and still get filtered out before anyone reads a word, simply because of where you are.

And there is something nobody warns you about. When you have been somewhere for ten years, you forget what you are standing on. People know you, and your reputation walks into the room before you do. Then you start over somewhere new and none of that comes with you. You are proving yourself from scratch, to people who have no reason yet to believe you. That is humbling, and it takes time. If you are in the middle of it right now, the time it is taking is not a sign that something is wrong with you.

Taking the pressure off

Life is full, and it always was. I have a main job, my own projects to build, and writing I want to keep doing. And I want to be there for the people I love, my mom, who means the world to me, my husband, my family.

So the real question was never whether to come back. It was how to fit something I love into a full life without it costing me everything else. The answer was to take the pressure off. This time I did the work quietly first and lined up a whole year of writing before I posted a word of it, so that showing up here never depends on me having a perfect week. I share when I am ready, not to a calendar. What you read is not me keeping up an act, it is my lived experience, the things I have actually been doing and learning. If I share something, wonderful. If I am not ready, that is fine too. That is the only version of this that lasts.

My community

A big part of how I keep this up is my community. I have a small group of people I trust, Dimitri Harding and Orane Findley among them, and we work alongside each other all the time. Day to day, that looks like:

Trading tools and the little tricks that save each other hours.
Passing a fix straight over the moment one of us cracks it and another is stuck.
Running demos for each other to keep ourselves honest.
Standing times on the calendar to work and sync, and group chats that never really go quiet.
Losing whole evenings, sometimes whole nights, to a coding session because we are too excited about what we are making to stop.

What I love most is how differently we all think. They bring skills and instincts I do not have, and I bring a perspective they do not. On your own, you can never exhaust all the ideas, because you only have one mind and one set of experiences. Together we cover ground none of us could reach alone, and honestly, that is what good testing really is, more than one mind hunting for what the others missed. It is also where AI fits, and where it does not. It hands you an enormous bank of information to pull from, which is genuinely useful, but it cannot make anything truly yours. You still have to guide it, and you still want real people in the loop. I get into that more in how I tested my AI-built blog.

What you can look forward to

All of that is what feeds this blog: the work, my community, and the way I actually use AI. And this is not a one-off. I have a full year of writing already planned, so there is a lot coming. A few of the things you can look out for from me:

How I actually use AI in QA and in building. The real workflows, not the hype: working with Claude and Codex, setting up CLAUDE.md and AGENTS files, the MCPs worth switching on, and where AI genuinely helps versus where you still need a human.
The honest story of building a game with AI agents. I built and launched a mobile game, and I am writing the whole thing: the design, the agents, what worked, and what AI simply could not see.
QA foundations, done properly. Bug reports and triage, test design, exploratory testing, and how to build a quality strategy that actually holds up.
Testing AI-generated code. How to tell whether that green checkmark is real, how to review AI-written tests, and how to test features that do not behave the same way twice.
The specialized work. Accessibility, security, performance, mobile, and API testing, explained so you can use it the next day.

There are also practical tools and resources on the site, like checklists and builders, that turn the articles into something you can actually run.

Coming back, on my own terms

So here I am, back, doing it in a way I can actually keep up.

If you stepped away from something you love, you can come back to it. You do not have to return loudly, or on anyone’s schedule. You just have to start. And if you kept showing up the whole time, sharing through everything it takes to put yourself out there, give yourself credit. It is harder than it looks.

If you have been quietly building something of your own, I would love to hear what it is.