2024 - A year in review

This post was published on December 16, 2024

Well, I guess it’s true: time does fly when you’re having fun! 2024 is coming towards an end soon, and since I’m deliberately slowing down this week and will be away from work for two weeks after that, this to me is a great time to look back on 2024 and what it has brought me professionally.

When I wrote my yearly review for 2023, I mentioned that I wanted to focus on a couple of different things in 2024:

• Training
• Mentoring
• Consulting
• Public speaking

Therefore, it makes sense to use this list as a structure for this annual review and go over each item in this list to see what I’ve done, what went well and what I would like to improve in 2025.

Training

The plan for 2024 was to spend more time and effort promoting my training services, with the goal of increasing the amount of training I did back towards the 2022 level. Overall, in 2024, I ran:

• 29 full day training sessions (10 on site, 19 online)
• 28 half day sessions (22 on site, 6 online)
• 7 free public workshops (all online)
• 3 conference workshops (all on site)

This is significantly more than in 2023, but still not quite at the level of 2022. Still, I’m very happy with these numbers, especially because I have managed to significantly diversify my training client base. I have run training sessions with more clients (14) than in 2023 (10), and these clients have come from more different countries (2024: 6, 2023: 5).

Several of these clients are return clients, and I am confident that I will keep working with most if not all of these return clients in 2025. However, I will spend (and have to spend!) even more time and effort to keep my training business growing.

This is one of the main reasons I have returned to LinkedIn after a much needed break, but I am going to at other channels and ways to find new training clients, too, preferably using channels other than social media.

Mentoring

In 2024, I worked with one corporate mentoring client, and I really, really enjoyed that. Over three months, I worked with a group of four testers, as well as the wider organization, to help them define an automation strategy and teach them how to build their first tests, bring them under version control and make those tests part of a build pipeline.

It was once again amazing to see how these testers grew more confident and knowledgeable by the week, simply by helping them define the next small step forward, giving them the confidence to take that step, making them learn from it and then look ahead for the step after that.

This kind of engagement is something I would like to do again with a different company in 2025, because it is both a lot of fun and very rewarding. Even though it is more expensive to a client than buying their staff a book or a Pluralsight account, or even than bringing me in for a day or two of training, the results are spectacularly more effective, too.

Consulting

I spent most of 2024 doing billed-by-the-hour consulting, for a variety of clients both in the Netherlands and abroad. A lot of that consulting was focused on implementing contract testing, by the way. It seems like 2024 has been the year that many companies decided they wanted to get serious about their contract testing and could use some help in that area.

For 2025, while I still want to keep doing consulting, I am thinking about offering my consulting services in a slightly different way. I have one ongoing consulting client that just extended my contract for another three months, using the same billed-by-the-hour agreement, but for future clients, I want to see if it’s possible to move towards value-based pricing instead. We’ll see how that works out as 2025 progresses.

Public speaking

One of the highlights of the year was the first trip to the US in 18 years, for the 2024 PNSQC conference in Portland, Oregon. I really enjoyed delivering both a keynote and a half-day workshop at that conference, as well as having the opportunity to do a bit of sightseeing in the area.

Including the PNSQC keynote, I delivered 30 talks in 2024, 8 more than in 2023. Many of these talks were online, but 12 of them have been on site, which I think is a good number. About half of those were public events, with the other half being in-company presentations.

A lot of these talks, too, were focused on contract testing, and for 2025, I would like to diversify a little more in terms of topics I speak about. I’m definitely looking to keep up the public speaking frequency, and my first talk for 2025 has been confirmed already.

Other facts and figures

Apart from what I mentioned above, I have been spending time on a couple of other things, too:

• I was part of the program committee for EuroSTAR 2024 and for the Test Automation Days
• I co-organized this year’s edition of the Dutch Testing Day
• I released 7 new versions of RestAssured .NET
• I wrote and published 15 blog posts (including this one), as well as one article for another website
• I traveled to 6 different countries for work (Belgium, Spain, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland and the US)
• The trip to the US added a third year to my ‘at least one work trip outside Europe per year’ streak, a streak I’m of course hoping to extend in 2025 (Africa again? South America maybe?)
• I was a guest on 7 different podcasts (5 more than in 2023)
• I started working on a public, self-paced course on contract testing, which will be complete in February 2025

All in all, I’ve worked on lots of different things, just the way I like it. I’m definitely looking forward to 2025 providing as much, if not more variety.

Some final words

While I would like to keep the variety I enjoyed in 2024, I also do want to spend more time outside of work in 2025. My goal for next year can be summarized as

“Physical, mental and financial fitness”

Physical fitness means spending more time outside, mostly during walks and long rides on my racing bike.

Mental fitness means shutting down from work more often in the evenings, on weekends and during holidays to spend time on other activities, like family, reading and playing and studying chess.

Financial fitness is an enabler for the first two and means a move away from billed-by-the-hour work towards selling more productized services and implementing value-based pricing where I can.

I can’t wait to see what 2025 has in store, but first, I wish you all a wonderful festive season.

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