TL;DR
You probably heard of the Speed Meet concept where you can meet new people in five minutes time slots. At Euro Testing Conference, you had a chance to speed meet with other attendees.
There were around 100-speed meeters. This year we did not use chairs; instead, we formed two circles while standing. The facilitator explained the rules. You first prepare a mind map. Mine is in the above picture. The map had three sections:
- about me
- what you want to learn
- what you want to teach
We had two minutes to ask each other questions related to our mind map. I had my pair, but as we were standing, it was hard to align all the participants. So just before the start, I lost my pair because there was the odd number of participants. I missed the first slot. Luckily, Alex Schladebeck (@alex_schl) was also late, so we paired for the next slot.
Alex is an Agile tester. Consultant. International keynote speaker. Linguist, musician, extrovert. Communicator. Sport & adrenaline junkie. Recently she has become CEO. I asked her about observability (her’s can teach) and what is Certified Unicorn (about her). Observability is a newly coined term in software testing, and the old school term is monitoring in production. But not just passively observing, using this information as input for our next test mission. Certify Unicron is recognition by the community that you are doing extra work that helps people to become better in something. In her case, this is software testing. As considering myself as an introvert, speed meet helped be to be equal with someone who is on the opposite spectrum 🙂
Things were moving fast, and I had around ten excellent conversations with interesting people:
- learns dead languages (old Greek, Sumerian). I found out that you do not learn how to speak those languages, you just learn how to read.
- Gatlin language for load and stress testing.
- Test Manager of an international company that copes with finding testers skilled for the appropriate role.
We were very loud, but I got used to it. Maaret (@maaretp) concluded speed meet with a teaser: if you like it, start it on your own at your local testing community!
