“Right from the start at ADGA, I had the opportunity to be involved in so many different projects, and be given different challenges. From working on marketing materials to designing PowerPoint presentations, and later the company’s website and Sharepoint intranet. Little by little, I learned. The environment here has always given me the room to grow and further my development.”
“What I do is the physical security inspection when there is a new installation of secret infrastructure. We check all the different types of zones in a building, the public zone, the reception zone, the operations zone, and the security zone. Then I analyze the emanation security, and what measures we can take to reduce the threat of attack.”
“I feel honoured to be a part of the important work that ADGA does, and understand the responsibility that comes with it. The nature of testing work can be very repetitive, systematically probing for problems to ensure everything works properly. But always in the background of my mind is who this work is going to help in the long run. It’s what makes me keep pushing myself mentally to understand the technology better and anticipating what can go wrong.”
“I joined the military in the first place because I wanted to be an astronaut, and all astronauts were military. But after completing my degree and military classification training, a career placement officer assigned me to the Directorate of Communication Security at National Defence Headquarters in Ottawa. Very quickly I got to work on some interesting projects and I’ve never looked back.”
“To me, looking for new and interesting ways of breaking things is like troubleshooting backwards. There's even some friendly competition between those of us in testing and the people on the development side. But it’s all with the ultimate goal of making a better product. I suppose I also like it simply because I'm good at it.”
"Who you choose to put at the front of the company, at reception, says a lot about what type of organization you are. It's the first face your client sees when they come to the company for meetings, it's the first voice that picks up the phone. To have someone there who is not really a native speaker—my first language is Moroccan—just speaks volumes about how diverse the company was then, and this has got even better with time.”
