What's Your Win For The Year? - 2021

🗄️ Archive
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As 2021 draws to a close, I thought we could reflect on our year of weekly wins and pick out some of our stand out wins for 2021.

My wins for 2021:

  • Moving into our new home :house_with_garden:
  • Finishing The Club overhaul project :muscle:
  • Enjoying every minute of maternity leave :baby:
  • Getting back out exercising again :walking_woman:

What’s your win(s) for 2021?

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Excellent set of wins there Mike :grin:

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What a year it was!

  • Advocating for better verification practices across all teams within the organisation, and being recognised for that
  • Increased my involvement in the testing community by:
    • blogging more (still not enough though)
    • Being more active on The Club
    • Delivering a 99-minute workshop
    • Giving a talk at Test.Bash()
  • Fine tuning my work-life balance to a level where all “stakeholders” are happy
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Always I am reminded, “You are your own biggest stakeholder.”

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Biggest win was probably winning Ninja of the Year :smiley:

My other biggest wins are recorded in my racket: Biggest testing win of 2021 & resolutions for 2022? | Racket

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2021 was an outstanding year for me:

  • contributed to 2 books as co-author and translator
  • changed my job, role and country lot of changes and BIG new challenge for me.
  • blogged more than 20 blogs
  • speaking at 12 conferences including 2 in person
  • making rackets
  • being part of this amazing community
  • having an excellent summer vacation
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I love these threads. I’ve been a little lax replying to them recently, but there is so much to be thankful for.

  • I was blessed that the community rallied around in February to find new work so soon
  • I’ve taken more chances with work than I’m used to, and I think it’s paying off
  • The Testing Peers podcast has persisted and grown into something I really feel proud of
  • I was able to speak up when I was struggling mentally, rather than suffering in silence, which was new and makes me so grateful for the friends and colleagues who were so supportive and understanding
  • We finally moved to Wales, after a process that took 14 months!
  • Didn’t open my work laptop once on a weekend
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Changed employer.
This is my sole big win for the year because it impacted so many areas of my life. I feel lighter and more focused again, my depression is lifting, and my relationship with my husband has improved. My previous employer was literally sucking the life out of me and I didn’t realize how bad it was until I left. The future looks brighter now.

I also want to say I’m not super active when it comes to posting in this community, but it has had a huge impact on my career and helped me gain confidence so I could be in the place I am today. Thank you all :heart:

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Bless, may the opportunities present themselves and all the right doors open for you in '22.

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  • I got involved in the testing community a lot more
  • Wrote a couple article on testing for MoT Dojo, a few posts for my blog
  • Organized a testing meetup for the first time
  • Mentored couple of junior testers
  • Worked on API testing a lot, REST and GraphQL
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  • Starting to make insanity go away
  • Driving Lessons
  • Walking my neighbour’s dog for a while
  • Going to physio
  • Making some stupid graphic jokes
  • Keep on testing
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Overcame my fear of public speaking and had my very first public workshop - thank you, MoT, for this amazing opportunity!
Took part in an important work project and contributed in a meaningful way
Started regular TestSphere sessions with our team
Started dealing with my mental health issues through medication and therapy
Started practicing violin again
And most importantly - I’ve grown so much both as a tester and a person during this past year!

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Great achievements Eva ! Keep rocking :muscle:

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  • Became well involved in cyber security at my company.
  • As our software is considered too challenging to automate, I wrote my own automation tool and had a nightly build.
  • Created my own card game for threat modelling.
  • Massive breakthrough in my mental health.
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Took me a little time to think about all the things I’ve done this year and it looks slightly overwhelming in one place but I wouldn’t change a minute of it so here are my 2021 Accomplishments.

  • Finally sorted out a proper brand and became A11_Ady on Twitter complete with stickers and mugs!
  • Created the concept of a software testing bootcamp.
  • Enlisted some awesome testers in @bethtesterleeds Beth Marshall, @sumanbala Suman Bala, @scottkenyon Scott Kenyon, @undevelopedbruce Bruce (the legend) and later @laveenaramchandani01 Laveena Ramchandani
  • Alongside them delivered the first ever free government funded software testing bootcamp
  • Went onto deliver to another 2 cohorts totalling over 80 people of which 50% identified as female and 50% were BAME
  • To date approximately half have secured their first job in tech
  • Created my monthly newsletter A11y with Ady, that’s a 1 1 y for accessibility
  • Delivered my Interactive Accessibility Quiz for the Ministry of Testing as a 99 minute workshop
  • Started working 1 day a week for the Coders Guild (https://thecodersguild.org.uk/) creating a Software Testing apprenticeship
  • Became my company’s accessibility Champion officially at Glean (formally Sonocent) (https://glean.co/)
  • Spoke at QA Beginners Club (https://www.meetup.com/QA-Beginners-Club/) on how I got into testing and why I’m an accessibility advocate / specialist
  • Delivered various other workshops throughout the year on testing and accessibility
  • Began working with my first apprentices
  • Made it to the SuperReads 2021 shortlist with my article, How Reindeers Browse the Web - An Access Story (How Reindeers Browse the Web - An Access Story | Synapse QA) there’s still time to offer feedback and upvote it :wink:
  • Celebrated my 55th birthday and 31st wedding anniversary :heart:
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That’s an impressive list, Ady. Nice.

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that’s a lot of good wins folks!:orange_heart:

some of mine are:

all things MoT:

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Can’t believe I forgot having a story featured in Testing Stories, organised by @melissafisher to raise money for charity.

The team have decided to donate all royalties sold through leanpub to Open Sourcing Mental Illness (OSMI), as we collectively value their mission statement and work in mental health in the tech and open source communities. https://osmihelp.org/

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It was a pretty interesting year.

My wins for 2021:

  • Switched back from Software Engineer to Software Engineer in Test job.
  • Moved to a completely remote work
  • Started to work at a job, that use a combination of my skills (testing, development, cryptography, finance) and interests (distributed systems)
  • Started to blog regularly (for the 3rd time), failed a bit, but found a solution
  • Started my Telegram channel about non-trivial testing (in Russian for now)
  • Read 40! books (both IT and non IT related)
  • Bought a microphone, recorded a lot of product demos, and get ready to podcasts (if I’ll be invited :slight_smile: ) and my upcoming Youtube videos

And finally - found an IT area that drives me every day (in terms of research) - it is distributed systems and blockchain. Specifically the quality of such systems.

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