I work at Dashlane as a QA engineer, where I work to ensure the stability of our product in the face of many possible bugs across all platforms. In a nutshell, a QA engineer’s job is to ensure we release the highest-quality version of the product each time.

To achieve that goal, we build testing procedures that cover all the features of the software, which requires a similar skillset to those of QA engineers in the gaming industry. Perhaps that’s why at Dashlane, three of our four-person QA team came to Dashlane directly from the video game industry. I’m one of them.

In today’s video game industry, there’s no open environment that compares to the web. Even in the biggest virtual worlds, everything you find in the game has been designed and implemented by someone in your company. Sure, there is obviously still room for bugs, but far less so than the infinite possibility of failures when you are working on a product that operates on the ever-growing web.

When I first started at Dashlane, I admit to wondering: “How the hell are we going to test the entire Internet?” Our software is full of small features that quietly wait for the user to reach a webpage that complies with specific conditions, and then it shows up right in time to help. Problems start when we look at how vast the web is and how varied its technologies are. Some of our features might work on 80% of websites, leaving 20% of multiple, specific failures that we have to manually identify, one by one. (In general, however, our semantic analysis accurately fills any one form 90-95% of the time which is industry-leading!)

Fortunately for us, our talented developer team has done a great job building Dashlane’s core technology in a scalable way. It’s able to handle most websites with a universal code; as a result, fixing one issue we identify and test on one specific webpage fixes thousands of similar issues on other sites.

Now, as previously mentioned, I come from the video game industry where I also worked in QA. Maybe some of you have heard of people being paid to test or “play” World Of Warcraft. For the record: testing WoW or any other game is not the same as playing it. As a QA engineer, so much time is spent checking every game-play mechanism, every game level, that when it finally is released to consumers, it’s as if I have never played it, in spite of we spending months working on it.

Testing Dashlane works much the same way. There are many scenarios to run, many features to check. But in the end, when a new version that I tested comes out, it feels like new. Making use of an app is very different than testing it!

This is, in my opinion a big part of the reason why QA people are moving from gaming to classic software, or the other way around. QA’ing is essentially the same, but the ability to change up what kind of product you’re working on is one of the perks. It’s also probably why you see so many people go from game to software, or the other way around. Of course, testing games can be a bit more amusing, especially when hilarious bugs come around.

Here’s one from my last job, as a QA engineer on a video game called Black Death. Needless to say this incredibly flexible yoga pose wasn’t on purpose:

For two intense weeks our dev team hacked away at an iPad prototype, from scratch, and had it ready for our demo at FinovateFall 2012 last Wednesday.

We presented the Dashlane iPad prototype, which demonstrated how in a matter of seconds, you can create an account, enter all your payment details, and buy at a store you’ve never been to before — no integration whatsoever required by the merchant. Talk about scale!

We believe this is game-changing given how difficult it is to buy on mobile right now, especially due to the lack of keyboards on such devices. Moreover, the opportunity on iPad is enormous: 88% of all folks who shop and buy on mobile are doing so on iPad. (Our full iPad app should be ready in 4-5 weeks, joining our mobile suite that already includes iPhone and Android.)

We were delighted to win a “Best of Show” award at the end of Finovate! This win is all the more exciting because the event marked our “coming out” to the financial tech and services world, so we didn’t know whether our promise of bringing truly frictionless, universal form-filling and transactions online would resonate with that audience. We’re glad to see it really did! Big names in the fintech world were eager to speak to us and see where our technology goes over time.

Congratulations to the other 7 companies that also won “Best of Show” awards, and to all the other presenters at Finovate. I was truly astounded by the number of amazing innovations presented during the event — both by household names and start-ups like ours.

Here are some of our favorite reactions, on Twitter, to our demo at FinovateFall 2012:

#finovate – Cool comedy on @dashlane – cooler even, their browser based wallet is making buying look too easy! BestOfShow? FastestBoughtOut?

— Duena Blomstrom (@DuenaBlomstrom) September 12, 2012

@dashlane is demoing form filling done incredibly well. #finovate. If this really works as advertised, that can be huge.

— Rajesh Jayaraman (@rajeshj) September 12, 2012

#Dashlane make a great pitch for the sense of humour award as well as a demonstration of some great payment technology #finovate

— Ian McKenna (@ianmckennaftrc) September 12, 2012

Dashlane demo @finovate looks awesome very impressive #Finovate

— luminousbanking (@luminousbanking) September 12, 2012

Great demo from #dashlane at #Finovate. Buy on any site w/out typing. Surprised a formfilling prop could be compelling. + Rich data to mine!

— achangster (@achangster) September 12, 2012

Well done, @dashlane at #Finovate.Huge time savings with completing online transactions thanks to your awesome solution!

— Kathy Wilson (@Rudybelle) September 12, 2012

Tkts for the New Yorker Festival go on sale today at noon. Wish I had the #dashlane iPad prototype to buy my tkts while at #Finovate

— achangster (@achangster) September 13, 2012

When the Mountain Lion operating system (OS) came out, I was really surprised by how many Mac users downloaded it right off the bat. Apple reported 3 million downloads in the first four days of its release! Maybe I’m still stuck in my PC-using days, but there’s never been anything about a new OS that made me do the “I want it, gotta have it, let’s go get it” dance. Plus, a new OS can be a bit tricky since not everything is optimized for it at the time of release.

Sure enough, there were changes to Mountain Lion that made even Dashlane stumble, despite our efforts to make the two play nice. (Luckily, we quickly got it up and running again.) But, a comment by one of our Board of User members, Brian, who was also surprised by all the early-OS- adopting, got me thinking about the old saying, “It pays to wait.”

Sometimes, it surely does. While Brian is the kind of person who likes to be on the bleeding edge of new technology, he recommends waiting a month after the release of a new OS before jumping on the bandwagon. “That way, all the major kinks are worked out and you know what kind of surprises you’re in for.” After listening to his story about how one of his coworkers upgraded his PC to the latest Windows version–which caused said coworker lose compatibility with a program that they use daily–I’m convinced that a month is worth the wait.

But there are certain products that depend on people taking a leap of faith right off the bat–Dashlane being one of them. Brian, who’s an early adopter of Dashlane and several other software, says that there a lot of benefits to adopting early, like access to new releases. “It’s worth it to get new releases, test them, and play a bigger part in developing the product. It adds to the fun and sense of community. But, one of the pitfalls is that I often get used to living with bugs. Bugs become the norm, and you come to expect them when–as with a seasoned product–you shouldn’t.”

So, where do you draw the line? When do you adopt early and when do you wait? I did a little office/Dashlane user poll to see what others thought, and here’s what we came up with:

When to adopt early:

• New apps that sound promising and require little risk or expense to try out
• Pets, since our very own Rudy is an adopted pup
• New mobile phone plans — sometimes the promotion is as good as it sounds

When it pays to wait:

• Devices like computers, phones, tablets, e-readers, etc. There’s always a newer one around the corner, which makes it worth the wait
• New operating systems
• New software packages, like the new Office Suite
• Cars, which sometimes get recalled
• New technologies that require a lot to gain traction, like 3D TVs — not everyone is on that bandwagon and it’s more expensive initially

Do you have any examples where it pays to adopt early? Or, do you have a story about a product that you wish you’d waited before getting? Let’s hear your stories :)

Also, if you would like to join our Board of Users and play a bigger part in the development of Dashlane, please email community@dashlane.com.

With the growth and popularity of OS X and iOS, it’s no wonder that we here at Dashlane are targeting Apple fans. The Mac’s incredible user experience, which is completely different than that on a PC, changed the game and set a new standard. OS X users, which make up the majority of Internet users, are used to Apple’s clean, intuitive, and refined user interface and interaction standards.

Sure, it happens that my experience in OS X development comes from working as a software engineer at Apple for several years, but that’s only part of why I love it. It was in interacting with the creators of the Cocoa frameworks and rapidly learning the architecture, that I found myself quickly falling in love with the technology. Programming on OS X (and iOS) has become my passion. It’s sometimes difficult, but it’s also very fun. It’s an art, and the result is often beautiful and magical.

After an awesome experience at Apple, I decided to seek out new challenges and jump into the universe of start-ups. That’s when I found Dashlane. It was just what I was looking for — an ambitious project, an incredible technology, and awesome people to work with. Dashlane has all the ingredients of a rewarding software engineering experience. Our product relies on different technologies and uses the current trends and best practices in the software engineering world. It even uses an Expert System! Best of all, I get to continue working on Cocoa.

Now I find myself in charge of the OS X application, bringing it closer to the high expectations of OS X users. I’m charged with building a high quality OS X application, paying a lot of attention to the UI and its responsiveness, and making sure that it scales well with large data. Additionally, I’m working on porting Dashlane to the Mac App Store (launching really soon, by the way!), and dealing with the development challenges in a sandbox environment.

Here at Dashlane, implementing your ideas and delivering them to users is not a complicated task or a “mission impossible.” Ideas backed by cogent arguments are always winners. And with the large number of ideas that you can imagine are suitable, you have the opportunity to develop your abilities in many different ways, so long as you can prove you can do it.

In my mind, this is the ideal environment for professional growth. If you code, you will have the ability to work on many different technologies. You may help the mobile team one day, do some back-end stuff work the next, build some UI, optimize memory or anything you’d like to do so long as you are up to the task.

Currently, I am working on significant modifications to Dashlane’s UI, which you’ll see in the next few updates, and I’m excited to hear your thoughts on them. In the meantime, feel free to let me know about anything that doesn’t match your OS X user’s eye — or of course to let us know what you think we’re doing well!

I’m a software engineer on the mobile team at Dashlane. In my career as a developer, I’ve designed and coded for tools, web apps, computer-scheduled programs, large-scale databases, search engines, various algorithms on Linux and Windows, both in B2C and B2B businesses and mostly at tech start-ups.

Oh, and I’m a woman.

This last fact shouldn’t have to be unique or surprising, but more often than not, it is. Even back in college, where I studied industrial computing, I was one of 25 girls in a class of 245. That’s when I first felt that I was indeed a girl in an essentially male environment.

Is the tech industry a boys’ club? Well, there are certainly more guys in it. Yet I believe that times are changing. More and more women are entering the tech industry. And this is necessary. After all, diversifying the tech workforce can only benefit the industry at large.

As far as being a woman in a male environment, I personally don’t think about it too much. I like talking about the Internet, technology, programming languages. I live and breathe code. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter to me that I am the only woman in a team of over 20 male engineers. What I care about is working with nice people who work hard, and getting equal respect and consideration, just as any other person on the team.

It saddens me to think that some women in tech have felt discriminated against or witnessed sexual harassment in the work place. But if you’re a woman and you want to work in tech, I wouldn’t let stories about a “brogrammer” culture deter you. Instead, focus on your craft, because your skills will speak louder than your gender.

I do believe that events and organizations focused on “women in tech” can be valuable in bringing more women into our industry. For starters, there’s a special way of networking between women can help individuals face challenges and share common experiences. Meet-ups for women in tech help broadcast empowering messages and views of women in the tech world. However, I feel that pushing “women in tech” too hard can be detrimental, by making it seem that this industry is really tough for women. It’s a fine balance.

Overall, however, to become a female developer, you should do as any other smart dev. Spend weekends and late nights in front of your computer, laying down lines of code, debugging and developing your personal projects. Follow tutorials, read articles, and learn on the fly. Master the lingo. And, if you are curious enough to go deep down to the core of what you are trying to build, you will acquire a large and useful understanding of computer science. In a nutshell, become a pure, hardcore geek developer.

One of the things I love most about programming is that it allows you to build things on your own. They can be rather ambitious tasks, or simple and amusing ones. The job itself requires a lot of dedication and precision, and you need to be highly motivated. But it’s incredibly rewarding.

At Dashlane, I am the only female developer, and while, yes, I’m known as “the girl developer,” that novelty doesn’t really affect my work or the work environment. I can take on any challenges I want, and my gender doesn’t define me. I respect my coworkers — and they respect me in return.