February 2020 Updates

This month has been busier than the last few and I’m feeling the need to chill. Part of this busyness is having just wrapped up teaching an AST-BBST Foundations class, which is about equally as intense for the instructors as they are for the students. The other part is at work, we are through our biggest week of the year aka Valentines Day (did you order your flowers?). Oh and my 49ers lost the Super Bowl. It’s fine, everything is fine now. At least I’ve settled in with my team being second best in the league this year. 

Come to think of it there are a few more things happened that are worth mentioning:

• On March 20, 2020 I’ll be speaking at a new free online conference by Kobiton called Odyssey on the topic of How I Became A Test Automation Engineer. This will be an updated (read better!) version of the talk I gave at the OTC. The conference takes place March 19-20, 2020 and you can sign up for free!
• I’m now the proud owner and maintainer of the Context-Driven-Testing website. This is the official CDT website created by Cem Kaner to share the CDT principles. Along with the principles comes a blog that I hope to add to over time. This is a huge thing for me as someone who takes a CDT approach to testing, to have this piece of history.
• In some ways I consider myself a bit of a historian of the testing community, especially around the areas of the community where “I came up”, e.g. around CDT. If you saw last month’s update you’ll know I also manage the LAWST website, which although is about Peer Workshops, definitely comes from the CDT community. To me these are some prized possessions because they contain a lot of history, a lot of writings about the growth and challenges of software testing community in general.
• It’s crazy to me that most of TestingConferences.org’s Sponsorships for the year 2020 are gone! I’m still working on a way to get Sponsorships set up here, but that’s on the long list of items in my backlog. Maybe next month I’ll get the time to do this?