Romanian Testing Conference 2017 was a blast!

This post was published on May 17, 2017

Last week I had the pleasure of taking part in the 2017 edition of the Romanian Testing Conference. I was contacted by Andrei from the organizing committee in August of last year, initially to host a workshop at what would be the first edition of a spin-off conference of the main RTC event. That conference unfortunately had to be cancelled, but Andrei from the organizing committee was kind enough to extend the invitation to this year’s edition of the original event. And what an excellent couple of days they’ve been!

Wednesday: Cluj
Wednesday saw a very early start to the day, with my alarm set at 3.45. My plane to Munich set off at 7.00, and after a quick and easy transfer I suddenly found myself in Romania! After getting into the country through customs I was faced with the first sign of how excellently organized this whole event would be: there was a car with a driver waiting for me at the arrivals hall to drive me from the airport to the hotel. I felt spoiled already!

After checking in to the luxurious Grand Hotel Italia I decided to go and see the city for a bit, as this day would be the only day where I’d have a little time to do so. I’m not really a city person (I spent an afternoon in NYC and thought that was enough..) but I’m making a habit of seeing more of the area I’m visiting than just an airport, a hotel and a conference venue. Luckily, the weather was gorgeous and there’s some really good coffee stalls to be found on the streets of Cluj, so it was time well spent.

Upon returning to the hotel, I met some of the other speakers, as well as Rob, the conference chairman. The rest of the day was fairly uneventful, with dinner in my room, watching Office Space for the umpteenth time and an early night. The day had been long enough, plus I thought it might be a good idea to be fresh and well rested in the morning for my workshop.

Thursday: workshop day
Thursday was show time for me, the day of my workshop on REST Assured (mostly) and WireMock (a bit). I heard in advance that my workshop was fully booked, which meant that there were 30 people that registered for it. Normally, when I do training, I’ll try and get no more than 12-15 people, but since this was the fourth or fifth time I’d be giving this workshop and I received exactly 0 emails from attendees that had trouble completing the preparation instructions I’d sent them a couple of weeks in advance, I wasn’t too uncomfortable with that.

I was pleasantly surprised that all participants were fully prepared, which doesn’t happen regularly. A great start to the day, because that means no time lost setting up people’s laptops. Instead, we were able to dive into REST Assured directly. I felt the workshop went rather well, the only thing I had a bit of trouble with is getting the interaction going. People asked me enough questions one-on-one when I was walking around when they were working on the exercises I provided, but I wasn’t able to get a lot of plenary discussion going. As a result, it was a bit hard to gauge whether or not people were engaged and interested, or bored and distracted. They seemed to be happy enough with the way I delivered the workshop, though. This was reflected in the ratings I received afterwards:

For those of you who are interested in what I covered in the workshop, you can find all of the slides, the exercises and the answers on my GitHub page here. Feel free to review, steal and otherwise use them for your own fun and profit. Or book me to deliver it to a place near you 😉

After the workshops were over, it was time for the official speakers dinner. We took taxis to a nice restaurant (the name of it escapes me for now) and I spent a great couple meeting new people (Keith, Beren, Nicola, Elizabeth, Kamila, Viktor and so many others) and catching up with others I met before (Ard, Huib, Rick and others as well). One of the highlights of the whole event for me, even though I felt somewhat knackered after a full day of teaching. After dinner, it was time for a last couple of drinks in the hotel lobby (not a bad place to spend some time either, as you can see below) and off to bed.

Friday: the conference
Because the hard part was over for me after delivering my workshop, I got to enjoy the conference day without the stress that comes with having to do a talk or anything else. This meant I could pick and attend the talks I liked, spend some time wandering around and talking to people, or just zoning out whenever I felt like it. The programme that was put together by the organizing committee was of very high quality, so most of the time there was at least one talk that was worth attending.

During the day, I enjoyed talks about finding and holding on to your passion (Santhosh), AI and Machine Learning (Cristina), introversion (Elizabeth), not talking about testing (Keith), bitter truths in test automation (Viktor, who seems to be able to read my mind), wrapping up projects and moving on (Nicola) and a closing keynote about youngsters and game testing by the awesome Harry (and yes, he’s really only 12).

All in all, another great day, but an exhausting one too. I wasn’t planning on attending the conference after party, but in the end I spent a couple of hours there anyway, talking some more to other speakers and attendees and reflecting on what was simply a wonderful event and an experience I’ll be remembering for a long time.

Saturday: back home
Unfortunately, the plane was scheduled to take off quite early on Saturday morning (my own fault!), but the flights home were uneventful and in the end I was happy to see my wife and kids again. When I’m writing this, I’m still feeling somewhat tired, but it was all more than worth it in the end.

If you’re ever considering attending (or better: speaking at) the Romanian Testing Conference yourself, I can only really recommend it. The organizing committee have put together a wonderful, high quality event and both speakers and attendees are taken care of in the best possible manner. And even though I’m trying to visit events in as many different countries as possible, I’m already considering going again next year!

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