As 2019 draws to an end, I look back at what I have been up to this year and what’s coming up in 2020.

This year I’ve managed to achieve some things I’m really happy with but I’ve also struggled to get a small number of things done which I really wanted to achieve before the end of the year.

The good stuff:

• I visited Stockholm, Sweden to speak at Swetugg. When I arrived there was so much snow, it was really beautiful though I did worry it may make travelling difficult. I was also able to see Thomas Sundberg who I’ve met a few times through SwanseaCon and a few other events - it was great to catch up.
• I was invited to and gave my first keynote at Test Istanbul. This was a really great conference where I met some great people, visited a new country and I was also able to take some of my family with me.
• I met up with Danny Dainton who I hadn’t seen in a while and we travelled to UK Star together where I gave a talk at the conference. The event was a lot of fun and I was able to meet up with some familiar faces.
• I co-ran a MoT Power Hour alongside Alan ahead of our London Testers Gathering workshop
• I co-ran a DevTools workshop for the London Testers Gathering in London alongside the amazing Alan Richardson. This was such an amazing experience, I’d never given a workshop before and it was fun to work alongside and learn from Alan. The workshop was a great success with roughly 15 people in attendance.
• I co-ran a manual to automation two day course in Ruby alongside Carlos in Cardiff, Wales. I’m fairly new to Ruby as well as running workshops so this was a great experience to not only learn from Carlos but to run a workshop.
• I continued to help co-organise a monthly meetup alongside Jordan Collier, Thomas Guest and Chris Cundil. Despite the various challenges of running a meetup these guys have been amazing ensuring we keep things going. It’s often forgot how much work goes in to getting venues, speakers and running the evening, without these guys we would have ran far fewer events this year.
• I created two new talks and was able to give them at a couple of meetups and one of them at the DDD South West developer conference in Bristol, England.
• 2019 I completed my first full year in contracting. I continued to work for myself and remain with NotBinary which has been great fun and a brilliant experience.
• SwanseaCon ran for it’s 5th successful year. This year was strange, I sadly didn’t feel as excited as I have in previous years about the event but it managed to sell out and I had lots of people (45+) on the wait list which was amazing. The feedback was great but at the moment I haven’t started thinking about a 6th year - hopefully I’ll find the drive and energy to sort this soon.
• I started a new community project which will involve software testers from all around the world - I’m hoping we can start to share this with the software testing community in the next few weeks…

The not so good stuff:

• Turned down a handful of speaking opportunities, two of which I really wanted to speak at. I’ve seen so many amazing things about AgileTD and unfortunately I was unable to make it. I also missed an opportunity to visit Moscow, Russia to give a talk at TestCon.
• Due to issues at home (a small flood), and having a small home it caused some issues trying to get a MoT (Ministry of Testing) course over the line. I’d spent the time with the team preparing the course but stalled due to the above issues when it came to recording it - I still hope to get this done ASAP but really wanted to get it done this year.
• Didn’t blog anywhere near as much as I would have liked to have.
• I couldn’t attend as many meetups and conferences as I would have liked to have.

In numbers:

• 4 blog posts :( - need to improve
• 2 new talks created
• 8 talks given, out of which 1 was a keynote
• 3 countries visited to give talks, 2 of which I hadn’t visited previously
• 2 new workshops co-created and run
• 1 conference organised
• 9 meetups co-organised

2020…

2019 is looking fairly quiet. I’ve only one invitation to speak so far which is in March. My main aim for 2020 is to get the MoT online course finished as well as also releasing the first part of the community testing project in the next few weeks. As for the rest of the year apart from a dry January I’m just going to see how it goes..