Spring tour 2024 is over. I can sit down and relax in the burning heat, instead of the chilly European summer. Testing has never been cooler.
Over a period of 2 and a half weeks, I’ve been traveling for 4 countries, giving 5 diffferent sessions. Here’s a recap.
I started directly at ExpoQA in Madrid. I came directly after no sleeping for a whole day, early flight at 5:30am , and continued until I crashed at 11pm. Lucky I wasn’t presenting that day. But I did go to Szilard Szell’s excellent “How Testing is Evolving in DevOps” (aptly named) and Isabelle Cosar‘s “Front-end Performance testing & Microservices“, which was something I’ve started getting into, and that talk gave me a whole lot of background.
Let’s get to work
On my second day, I presented “Clean Tests with Playwright” Master-class. It was supposed to be a whole bunch of people clicking on their laptops, building Playwright tests and refactoring them. Well, there was a whole bunch of people, but only a few brought laptops. So I poured a little magic dust and… No, that didn’t help with the laptop situation. Instead this has become a walkthrough of what I’ve prepared. People seemed to like it. I was happy.
Other noteworthy talks I attended were Sander van Beek‘s very good “Make a fearless start with security testing“, which gave a direct introduction for the threats to modern (and probably not so modern) apps, but also, how how to face them. And of course, the viking-fighting themed keynote “Left flank is falling! Continuous communication in the heat of battle” of Veerle Verhagen. It taught me that vikings take care of each other. At least when not conquering outher lands. It’s funny that communication is not what we remember them for.
Some of the people I would later see over the next few conferences. What I like most about conferences is meeting the people. My tribe. It’s welcoming, and like me, somewhat sarcastic. Check this picture of the speakers after day one (~40 hours into my sleepless day).
With (left to right, in columns, sort of): Linda van de Vooren, Beren Van Daele, João Proença, Sanne Visser, Russell Craxford, Isabelle Cosar, Kristoffer Nordström, Szilard Szell, Veerle Verhagen, Amir Shani, Mazin Inaad, Heather Reid, Sander van Beek
Lots of celebrities (apart from me) in the picture. Outside: Taylor Swift, who had a small-ish concert at the time of conference in Madrid. Stars aligning, and such. Oh and Sander is tall. Very.
Back to Tallinn
I’ve only managed to be in Madrid for 2 days, then it was of to Estonia and Nordic Testing Days. That’s me on stage, with code and all:
That’s my 5-6 time at NTD (I lost count). Still not the champion (it’s Sami Soderblom). Had the largest workshop for “Introduction to Playwright”, and this time people did bring laptops, and they were hitting them very loudly (with pleasure, I assume). The workshop was the first day, so I could focus on friends and other talks.
Here’s one from the Speaker’s Dinner:
Stars in the picture: Craig Risi, Dawid Pacia, Benjamin Bischoff. This was a medieval dinner, which I sort of remembered being in one of the former NTDs, but only when we got there and it was dark, I actually remembered.
Noteworthy talks I saw: First was Dawid Pacia’s “API testing journey through web protocols“, who gave a nice overview of web protocols and standards, and when they are used. Very good. Benjamin Bischoff’s “Old Tools, New Tricks“, was about tools that still work. Like Selenium, bash scripts. And if they work, you should probably use them, and don’t jump on the new hotness. Like Playwright? Nah.
Of course, there was a lot more abound for the community events (POWERPOINT KARAOKE. ’nuff said). But also this guy:
In the picture: Alex Cusmaru and friend. Outside the picture: Ard Kramer, Kevin Harris and yours truly.
Then it was off to EuroSTAR and RTC. That’s on the next post.
PS. If you want some Playwright madness, check out my “Introduction to Playwright” workshop.
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