Happy conference visits and good conversations

The last few months have been a barrage of conference visits, some online, some physically. I was extremely happy to discuss with the audience during and after the talks. In some, I was a speaker, in some an exhibitor and in one a volunteer! Anyway, Dragons Out fantasy theme to teach children some software testing works. People like it and recommend it to others. I'll have to buy some more books for my conference talk book sales. You can always check where to buy the books here, or just google Dragons Out.

The success of the conferences is great but I'm actually even happier that the free Creative Commons presentation Dragon Lesson in Software Testing attracts many volunteers to translate it into local languages for the joy and use of local teachers. To date, the presentation https://www.dragonsout.com/p/presentation-for-teachers.html has been published in 18 languages. It exists in Finnish and English written by me, and there are Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, Georgian, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Spanish LATAM, Turkish and Vietnamese translations. There are more languages in the works by more volunteers. This is the power of the testing community! Together, we can help all the teachers in the world in their vital task of creating citizens with IT skills with the ability for critical thinking, creativity, diverse thinking, and yes, coding and testing skills.

I regularly get questions about the translation of the book Dragons Out! to different languages. Some people would like to help in translating, some just read the local version of the book, or get it for their kids in a local language. I've been happy to tell about the ongoing work on French, German, Hungarian, and Polish versions and more in the pipeline. With some languages, I need to have further discussions with my English publisher Austin Macauley Publishers. But it is just a matter of time before we'll have many local versions available.

About the conferences, I participated as an exhibitor in a teacher trade fair and conference called Päijät-Hämeen seudun mentoripäivät, which brought lots of teachers together. It was great to hear of the ongoing enthusiasm in the teacher world. I talked at German Testing Day online and had a wonderful, energizing experience of half an hour of Q&A with more and more fantastic questions. In Finland, I talked at Teknologia 22 fair, at Tivia Stage. It was great to see the audience! In Dublin, adjacent to ISTQB General Assembly, there was Dublin Global Test Summit where speakers were invited to give their presentations in a nice recording studio. The delivery of my Insights from Children talk was so much fun.  Next talk was in Live2Test online conference – another excellent online experience. I do like talking online. It gives a feeling of talking to many more people than otherwise possible. But, of course, physical conferences are a different ballpark. So much energy, so great to see faces, so fantastic to interact with the audience. My next talk was at a physical conference, Nordic Testing Days in Tallinn. That event is always a super event in terms of interaction and now after so many corona-restricted months (or years to some participants), the amount of energy milling about was amazing. I enjoyed thoroughly speaking to the 400-person conference crowd. I’ve run also some company-specific courses and talks, also good learning and interaction happening in them.

Finally, I took part in the EuroSTAR as a volunteer to run the famous Test Lab experience with Razvan and Jackie. It was great to be in EuroSTAR after winning the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award last year. This felt a lot like contributing back to the event that has honoured me with this most prestigious award in Europe. We ran different software for conference participants to test in numerous ways, we organized challenges and games to make people get new insights into testing. I was able to run the drawing exercises and dragon games from my book Dragons Out. Even though I had seen many children in classes and many conference participants do these exercises over past two years, this time the conference-goers had so good time with the exercises that it also made me feel so much joy and, proudness, I suppose. Thank you EuroSTAR participants, you are the best!

I'd like to share recordings of my present talk.  You can enjoy the talk in English here (recorded at Dublin Global Test Summit) and in Finnish here (recorded at Teknologia 22 fair). You can see all my talks, slides, recordings, and news here.