On TestBash Manchester

This post was published on November 1, 2017

I’m writing this blog post sitting in the Manchester airport departure area, waiting for my flight home to Amsterdam. I’m tired, but in the best possible way. Yesterday, I’ve delivered a talk of one of the best conferences I’ve been part of so far: TestBash Manchester.

The story begins about three quarters of a year ago with me deciding (on a whim, to be honest) to submit a talk on trusting your automation and how automation can deceive you to the Continuous Call for Papers that the Ministry of Testing has for their TestBash events. I chose Manchester and Philadelphia as the target events for my talk, because those were the places I’d most wanted to go to. Some time later an email arrived bearing the message that my talk was accepted for Manchester. Needless to say, I was very happy with that! I’m by no means an expert speaker (yet?) but I do think I’ve got something to say, plus I like to travel (within reason), so this was an excellent opportunity to combine practicing my public speaking skills and revisit a country that I somehow had managed to avoid for the last 12 years, even though it’s only an hour’s flight away.

Fast forward to October 26th (skipping a lot of tinkering with my slides in between) and I find myself in Manchester. Spent most of the Thursday morning travelling from home to the airport, flying and on the tram to my hotel. There I introduced myself to the brilliant concept of Ziferblat where I spent a couple of hours working on some other stuff (living the glamorous life right there!) before heading into town for some R&R catching a film.

Since the conference was already well on its way with a Rapid Software Testing course and a day of workshops (in which I did not take part this time), MoT organized a pre-conference meetup on Thursday evening. That was a great opportunity to finally put faces to a lot of the names I’ve been seeing flying around on Slack and social media in the weeks leading up to the event. It was also great meeting a couple of people again that I’ve met at other conferences before (Rick, Beren, Ash, Marianne, Richard and I might have forgotten one or two). Funny, by the way, how you only meet some fellow Dutchies at conferences abroad, yet never get to meet and talk to them in your own country..

After dinner, some good chats and a couple of drinks it was time to head back to my hotel and get some sleep before the big day. This turned out to be a harder challenge than I thought, the travel efforts, nerves and just enough drinks ensured I had quite a restless night and found myself wide awake at 5 AM. Made the most (yeah right) of it by tinkering with my slides some more before having breakfast and finding my way to The Lowry, which served as the conference venue. There I met some more great people, including the Master Of Disaster Ceremony, Leigh Rathbone. He’s a character, alright! In all seriousness, though, he did an awesome job introducing all of the speakers and keeping energy high throughout the day, something that is not an easy task. Well done, Leigh!

After what can only be described as a series of amazing talks by Anne-Marie Charrett, Göran Kero (thank you for introducing me to ‘automation bias’ and providing a label for a good part of the content of my talk) and Gem Hill it was time for my own talk. Despite being quite nervous -which I tend to see as a good thing, if I’m not nervous it’s a sign I don’t care- it went over really well, and to my relief there were plenty of questions during the Q&A section. I’ve delivered talks before where there were no questions at all afterwards, and believe me, that’s not a nice position to be in as a speaker.

The rest of the day was filled with excellent talks as well. Coming down from the rush of a talk, I generally tend to hide in a corner for a while and process all of the impressions and the feedback, but that just wasn’t an option here, since I really wanted to see all of the talks. Zoning out had to wait until afterwards! After all of the talks were done and the 99 second talks (a part of every TestBash event) were over too, it was suddenly over. But then it was not, because drinks!

Got some great feedback on my talk during the after-conference drinks and spent some more time talking to other speakers and attendees. Then we headed out for dinner with a smaller group, during which fatigue really kicked in and I decided to call it a day.

If I had to choose, my personal favourite talk was the one from Martin Hynie. It perfectly reflected the point I find myself on in my career: an apprentice of the craft on his way to hopefully one day become a master. I loved Martin’s personal story and the way he reflected on his own journey towards being the best possible version of himself, something that I am aspiring to do as well. I’ll have what he talked about running through my head for a while, I’m sure. More on that probably next week.

Reflecting on it all, this has been a fantastic event for me, some more experience as a conference speaker under my belt, and more importantly I learned so much from the other talks I’m still busy processing it all. Thank you so much, Ministry of Testing, Richard, Rosie, Claire, Gem, Beren, Neil, Hugh, James, Heather, Rick, Marianne, Marcel, Vera, Andrew, Matthew, Patrick, Michael, Robyn, Stephen, Anne-Marie, Vernon, Göran, Cassandra and all the other wonderful people I met and talked to during the event. I’m looking forward to my next TestBash already, which will be in the Netherlands!

I’ll be hosting a workshop on creating an automation strategy that works there, together with Ard Kramer. I am looking forward to seeing you all there!

Here are the slides from my talk, in case you’re interested:

The talk itself has been recorded and will be made available through the Ministry of Testing Dojo. Also, here’s an awesome sketchnote of my talk made by Constance:

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