TestBash Manchester - On discovering a community around Testing

Last week I attended TestBash Manchester, leaving at a gruelling 4am and getting back home after midnight, but it was very much worth it.

I suppose I’d never really considered that there even was much of a Testing community, given that a lot of people I knew saw it as either just a stepping stone to development or a job that ended at 5pm that was just there to pay the bills.

So it was refreshing to see James Bach open up with an analysis on Testing, and Huib Schoots expanding on this new notion of a community, and prompting genuinely enthusiastic testers to blog and talk to one another and share knowledge, so this is my way of doing that now.

Coincidentally there was also a quick “99 second talk” by Dan Billing, a few of whose videos on Security testing I’ve seen before, who let us all know about a new vulnerable project he’s setting up so I’ll take a look at that (Ticket Magpie, for when I need to remind myself..) which is very convenient, since I was fast running out of vulnhub.com VMs to play with! (But more of those in another post)

So this is me now ready to make my own enthusiasm and adventures in testing a little more public, I guess the next stop is to get a non-personal twitter account to make following all these new speakers I encounter easier.

I’m also a follower of the netsec and qualityassurance subreddits, both of which are always very interesting and helpful so I’ll always be caught there too, but the speakers mentioned above should give me the beginnings of a regular set of blogs to check up on, as I’ve never been a habitual blog-reader (or writer) before.