{"id":148,"date":"2010-06-09T22:38:25","date_gmt":"2010-06-10T05:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=148"},"modified":"2010-06-09T22:38:25","modified_gmt":"2010-06-10T05:38:25","slug":"this-weeks-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/this-weeks-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"This week’s conference"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every year, Microsoft\u2019s Engineering Excellence group holds an internal conference \u2013 five days of talks, panels, booths and receptions (in other words, it\u2019s just like any other conference, except only Microsoftees are invited). This is the first year since 2004 where I\u2019ve been at the conference and not<\/strong> in the EE group. You\u2019d think that it would be a new experience, but somehow I managed to get myself signed up to present in more sessions than I\u2019ve ever<\/em><\/strong> been involved in at this event.<\/p>\n

But first, on Monday morning, as the opening keynotes were just ending, I was talking to a group of brand new Microsoft employees. I speak at Microsoft\u2019s new employee orientation fairly often, and it\u2019s something I really enjoy. In the afternoon, I was involved in two sessions. The first was called something like \u201cwhat testers at MS should know about testing outside of MS\u201d. I think a lot of testers in the industry think that all there is to know about testing and software development exists in their itty bitty tiny corner of the world. Because they never look outside of their little corner, they never realize the truth (if you\u2019re reading this, this probably isn\u2019t referring to you). A colleague of mine kicked off the discussion, and I handled the middle section on communities. I talked about many of the forum and discussion sites currently available, including a shout-out to weekend testers<\/a>. The session closed with a discussion of non-MS testing tools, specifically in the open-source area.<\/p>\n

The second talk was a panel discussion on \u201cThe Reality of Careers in Test\u201d. I thought the talk had a good setup, when the \u201cbaby\u201d of the panel announced that he had been testing for only<\/em> 11 years (the range went to 24 years). We had just worked the q&a into a groove when it was time to wrap up \u2013 it would have been nice to have a longer session, but it went well.<\/p>\n

I hosted a two hour session on Tuesday. We took a deep look at one class of tools used by testers at Microsoft and had panels of owners discuss features and answer questions. One sort of cool thing we tried was to display a feed of questions and comments from (an internal twitter-like tool) during the discussion section. I thought it worked out pretty well and will have to think about how I can do something similar at an external conference someday.<\/p>\n

In a session today, I hosted a sixty minute roundtable discussion on test careers. The discussions went well (from my point of view at least), and it was fun. Tomorrow I\u2019m invited to a \u201cspecial leadership\u201d session (no presenting, just listening). I\u2019m going to try to attend the whole session, but I\u2019m probably going to have to break to spend some time on my \u201cday job\u201d.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d love to say that next year I won\u2019t give any talks, but I\u2019m pretty sure that\u2019s not going to happen. I like to take what I know, combine it with my experiences, and try to help people learn something new or get better at what they\u2019re already doing, so I guess there\u2019s no avoiding it for me. <\/p>\n

But that\u2019s ok!.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every year, Microsoft\u2019s Engineering Excellence group holds an internal conference \u2013 five days of talks, panels, booths and receptions (in other words, it\u2019s just like any other conference, except only Microsoftees are invited). This is the first year since 2004 where I\u2019ve been at the conference and not in the EE group. You\u2019d think that…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}