I just did a technical audition for a possible new position.  I got a toy program in Java plus a single JUnit test case, and the assignment was to get this up in Eclipse, build some JUnit unit tests with 80% or better code coverage, and report bugs found.

I've never done anything at all with Java, let alone JUnit, or Eclipse.  I haven't been a developer in over 20 years, and I think IDEs were getting started then, but I've never used one. (Well, I suppose Hammer Visual Basic could be considered an IDE, but it is *so* special-purpose ...)  I downloaded Eclipse to my little Ubuntu laptop at home, and though getting acquainted with it and Java and JUnit on a too-small screen was kind of aggravating - WOW.  I'm hooked.  Programmer tools are dramatically better than they used to be (duh!), which I already knew in a general kind of way, plus I'd gotten a clue from the bit of getting acquainted with Python that I've done recently.  All this support stuff done for me that I used to have to do myself, or do without (like code coverage information -  I found EclEmma the Eclipse code coverage plugin), and it's Free Open Source Software!  FOSS rules!

I had a blast with that assignment.  I'd forgotten how much *fun* it is to sling code.  I've missed it, and I want it back.  Fortunately, just about all of the QA/test job openings I've seen want automation/programming skills.

I've been writing scripts for my telephony test tools all along, why hasn't that satisfied my desire to code?  Well, it does when I'm figuring out how to do something new, but I haven't gotten much of that lately.  Most of the script work I do now consists of making minor tweaks to an exisitng script.  The results can be satisfying, especially when I succeed in reproducing a problem found at a customer site that has my developer baffled, but they rarely scratch the coding-itch.