I find it handy to reflect on a month since we’ve entered a new one.
Very pleased to see The Club evolve into what it is now with the new chat channels and revised topic categories. And it’s cool to have seen a good number of new community members get involved. Hi there!
Also happy to see Masterclasses coming back again, having set a couple up (and more on the way).
I’ve also been extremely pleased with how our LinkedIn Newsletter experiment is going. I write a short article based on existing MoT articles. They’ve gone out on Tuesday and Thursday each week. The numbers are staggering. 25,975 subscribers since January 26th!
How about you, how was your February? What key learnings did you have? What pockets of joy can we celebrate with you?
February for me has been all about learning together with my new team at work, we formed late last year and really started to ramp up after everyone was back in January!
Together we have started to run regular 3-hats (3 Amigos) sessions, experiment with Example Mapping, and this last one I’m super happy with, running cross-discipline ensembles to test our new feature!
The engagement from not only everyone in the team, but also other teams we are working with to get involved together in testing sessions has been simply awesome. Including frontend and backend devs taking interest in each others work, and joining sessions for features they wrote as well.
I’ve had a rum few years, but starting to find my way into better times. I work for a really lovely team (mobile app development) and enjoy my day-to-day, but stuff outside work has been stinking up my mood. It’s starting to get better, though.
I’ve recently started exploring mobile automation options and have discovered Maestro. Having struggled and failed to get other frameworks working (don’t ask!) I was surprised to find this was actually pretty easy to get going. I could compile some quick tests within a few minutes, order my flows in a way that is maintainable, and have really enjoyed my experience with it.
It’s a fairly new tool and bug remain, features are missing. However, it’s very promising, and the devs are responsive on their Slack channel. Makes me happy to get something working that I’ve failed to do in the past! Trying something different often works.
February was pretty good on the whole, thank you. I got 360 feedback, which was great - a lot of nice things said, and the negatives are all actionable and within grasp to improve in the next 6 months.
It’s been a bit hectic with a big feature release coming up that actually has a deadline for the tech teams, which is not how we usually work. It’s been explicitly stated that no one is allowed to work over hours to achieve it though, and if we don’t think we can make it, we cut scope rather than increase engineering hours, which is cool.
Hopefully we don’t continue on this track though because it feels a bit conveyor belt-y for the team. I continue to love my team and my manager.
Outside of work, Mwg (dog 1) has made huge improvements with walking nicely on the lead, thanks to a lot of dedicated hours from both of us working in lots of different kinds of environments. Myrddin (dog 2) has finally decided to be friends with the blahaj instead of trying to eat them, although he did chew the hand off one of my childhood dolls after I left the door to the spare room open.
I made great progress with editing my fantasy novel, finishing big picture edits on the first quarter. I’m on track to have the book ready to send to beta readers by the end of this month, which is awesome.
Very busy, but also productive. I managed to find some time for blogging and worked with @restertest on our joint demo/presentation for TestBash Spring and had a fun pair-testing session with a friend of mine who’s looking to get into testing.
