I made it a goal to speak at a conference this year. I did not expect it to be very achievable, but I know that the best way to learn is to try to teach so setting myself a target seemed wise.

Having Google Analytics running on my blog also shows me that many people are out there looking to solve the same problems that I write about: Around 1300 people viewed my blog last month making nearly 3100 page views and there were 26 views in one day on a single page recently. I’m sure at least some of you find them useful.

Step one: Community meetup

I don’t consider myself an expert, but of course I do use testing and assertion libraries far more often than a typical developer. My company Altitude Angel recently paired with iO Associates to relaunch a dot net community in Reading where we are based. For those who don’t know their UK Geography, Reading is a town in England to the West of London that is home to many software companies including Microsoft.

Having been treated to a demonstration of a number of new features of the upcoming C# version 8.0 from none other than Stack Overflow legend Jon Skeet, for meetup number two I put my name forward to give a lightning talk.

The topic was inspired by a comment I made on a pull request suggesting the use of the NUnit 3 Multiple Asserts feature where a unit test was checking several properties of the result. I was very surprised that this feature was unknown to most of the devs in my company.

Inspired by his confidence to sit and editing and running code in the IDE (Visual Studio of course) I decided to do the same. Comparing the results of test failures with different assertion strategies is kinda niche, but even with a room full (~70 people) of mostly production developers it was well received.

Step two: National conference

This shouldn’t really be a surprise for you given the banner add at the top, but just as I was preparing for the lightning talk I was approached (through LinkedIn of course) about the idea of presenting at The National Software Testing Conference later this month.

Despite a massive dose of imposter syndrome, I pitched a couple of ideas that I felt I had enough material to talk about and was shocked to have my proposal for a keynote talk on “Making the most of scarce resources. Automated Test Specialists” (catchy title eh!) accepted.

Slides are prepared, mental rehearsals have started and I am extremely nervous but hopefully I will make some points that hit home to at least some of the audience.

Step three: The world?

Well who knows.

I still have a goal of presenting at a SeleniumConf someday. I am still not quite where I needed to be to pitch for SeleniumConf London this year, but I certainly aim to be ready by August to start pitching.

In Summary

Progress made:

• Survived giving my first lightning talk to a local developer group
• Submitted a proposal to talk at a national testing conference
• Been invited to give a 20 minute keynote speech next week (Gulp!)
• Prepared my slides and talk
• Been invited to join the QA panel at the end

Lessons learnt:

• There are plenty of people out there who have things to learn from you: In my case it took a ‘Wow I never knew that’ from the CTO to my comment in a code review to realise that
• Nothing teaches you better than preparing to share what you know

A reminder:

If you want to ask me a question, Twitter is undoubtedly the fastest place to get a response: My Username is @AlexanderOnTest so I am easy to find. My DMs are always open for questions, and I publicise my new blog posts there too.