Testing adventures - research, projects, conferences, good practices and public library
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My 2019 in a nutshell

My 2019 in a nutshell

Everyone uses the opportunity to sum up their year, so influenced by them I also decided to share my summary.

What went good?

  1. I got nominated as tester of the year by testrzy.pl - thanks great prize for the effort pushed to conferencing. Thanks also to Objectivity for supporting my public speaking journey.
  2. Conferences - there were lots of them, just to mention: Gdansk, Dublin, Frankfurt, Minsk, Vilous, Wrocław, Bukarest, Poznan, especially I am proud of Dublin and Frankfurt as they were my first western Europe conferences in Testing and Agile subjects.
  3. I moved to a Test Management position at SpyroSoft - new job is totally different for me, not only because of test management responsibility, but also because of moving to automotive industry and thinks like ISO-26262:2018 Functional Safety, V-Model Automotive SPICE and lots of standards.
  4. I still work on Testers Career grow subjects both as conference presentations and continue to work on them for mindmap project - ie. workshop at ŁuczniczQA in Bydgoszcz.

What could be better?

  1. Meetups - I really missed the opportunity to work on the workshops about testers career at polish meetups. Some opportunities were lost due to my work change, some as a result of busy conferencing season and I also lost contact with some of meetup organizers. Hope to work on this more in next Year.
  2. I totally lost my blogging/library schedule. I just finished describing my conferences form 2018, none of 2019 are live. I have many categories empty here and even reporting is not so frequent that I would expect.
  3. My self-employment company web page is not done, sad but true. I totally lost it.
  4. After one of the conferences trip my health wen really bad. It ruined my 2019 triathlon season, I lost the schedule to train, hat a lot of trouble with myself and grained a lot at weight. I tried few doctors in consultations, but still after 5 months we achieved the problem to be gone, but without correct diagnose and proper treatment.
  5. Books reading, I did some good reading while starting new project in Automotive, got like 4-6 book read about Functional Safety and Automotive Software, but still am far away from my targets for 2019. I ordered a Kindle paperwhite and still not use it frequently.
  6. Programming - SWIFT learning and Python learning not even started :(

Plans for 2020?

  1. Meetups - I plan to book some slots in At least 3-5 meetups to finish off the project about "Testers career growth mindmap" at least one or two in the North, 1-2 on East and 1 in West. I hope to finish up the project this year.
  2. Conferences - I hope to try to limit them, by more focused at Western Europe and hopefully run few sessions where I get invited. I probably will continue returning to Wilno. I already confirmed Sofia and Madrid. We will see what future brings.
  3. Professional work - I plan to continue my growth in test management role, but keeping the subjects of Product Mastery and Consulting still open. I am happy in my current project and will be open for great opportunities. I got a nice talk with Marta Firlej about state of art test expert teams and might try to sell similar idea in my company? Who knows maybe I will move to building something similar? Will see...
  4. Local work - There is an opportunity to start something new locally in Namyslow. Like trying to bring IT to small cities. No idea if it will shape in something real in 2020, but fingers crossed. Lots of ideas dancing around about co-working offices, innovation hub, IT trainings, workshops ad schools, professional services offering. Hard to say which way it would go, how fast, when or anything.
  5. Homework - got some ideas about my personal projects:

Autonomous drone - I plan to work on Sphero RVR and based on some Sparkfun accessories for RaspberryPI try to build and then program an autonomous driving drone. This should be more oriented Python learning.

My web page and library - I will try to finish the PIIAR Software Consulting page in Q1.2020 and in Q2.2020 summarize the 2019 conference at the Ghost.io platform and with re-posting content work on building there a library about autonomous cars, testing, consulting and product mastery. Fingers crossed.

Books - I want to go back to reading books, at both sport - triathlon, test management and running a company. Hope they will help me to push forward with the above plans.

Sport and Health - I plan to continue diagnose of my body to fix the issue I had in 2018. I already moved back to better food and some sport activities, but from sport perspective the plans for 2020 is no competition, just fun. If I mange to fix the issues then hopefully 2021 will be a more working year. I still plan to relax myself on fishing trips one a month in the season :)