Things Testing Taught Me

Alright so, you've decided you want to try your hand at speaking at a conference. That decision alone is exhilarating... and terrifying. But where do you start? If you don't have a mentor (yet) who has some experience with conference speaking it can be really daunting to think about how to break into the conference speaking circuit, but it isn't as hard as you think (in my experience, with testing conferences)! In this blog post I'll go into details about how (and where) to get started up to the application process, I'll cover actually speaking in a follow up! Shoutout to Shannon Draper for inspiring me to write this after a long winded conversation (in a small town in Colombia) about speaking at conferences Disclaimer: I am not an expert, this is simply my advice based on my experiences! So where do I start? Pick a topic!       The ideal starting place for speaking at a conference, is to have a topic in mind. It's great to want to speak at conferences bu

In my last post I talked about knowing when it was time for me to let go of my old job and old company in search of better things for myself and my career. This time I'm going to change it around a little bit, how do you know when you need to let go of someone from your team, for the good of your team?  Recently I saw our QA team be cut in half due to layoffs. Although I wasn't directly involved with the decisions that were made at that point in time I did need to mentally come to terms with what had happened and come to terms with the fact that I played a part in a small way.  When I started at my new company I had been told that the team had some growing to do and that there would be challenges that I would be asked to help find solutions for. Fortunately, a week before I started someone else also started, a Senior Test Strategist who is one of the most incredible testers I've ever had the pleasure of knowing. So the good news was that I wasn't going to be goin