Things that went well.
Met Pradeep, but I won't tell that story again.
Had a great conversation with Derk-Jan de Grood about how to get to international testing conferences, with some small tips for whose I am thankful.
Met Mauri Edo. I am a follower of this fellow tester since some time, and it was really nice to share some talks with him as well as Tony Robles, Luis Miguel Perez, Morten Hougaard and some other great people that attended this conference.
Things that I should do better.
Study the conference brochure, talks and talkers. I woke up, got a tube, flew a plane, a short ride, a cup of coffee and I got to the conference hall, and I realized that the tutorials had already begun, and I had to choose where to go and also, whenever you go to a conference with more than one thing happening at the same time, you need to have a plan BEFORE you choose, or you might feel stupid, as it happened to me.
As for the talks, try to find some problem that you might have that could be addressed on the talk, be selective and remember to mark at what time and where the talk starts. I lost the beginning of Mauri Edo's talk because of my bad planning.
When looking for talkers, check if they blog, if they tweet and read a bit about what they write about, maybe you find some common topic that could come out if some conversation happens.
Things that I should not do again.
Go without contact cards. Kyungsoo Yang, who came all the way from Korea, was so kind to give me his contact card and I found myself without being able to respond with my own. Somewhere there was an blog post about this, I knew about it, so I knew it could happen, so its time to do something about that.
Three things I got out from the conference.
QA&Test is a nice little conference, where skilful and passionate testers have a opportunity to gather in such a nice city as Bilbao is. Also, sponsors don't have any speaking track, so you don't have this feeling about some marketing dude selling his motorcycle.
Involve in the business. I knew that our product is the sum of the code and the settings, and testing the code is quite what I do, but then there is another layer, how things are set up in production, and I think this is as important to test as many questions about the business might arise from a careful observation. Assisting to some talks confirmed to me this point so now I know I have a path to improve over there.
If you like conferences, submit a proposal for a talk. Because it is a cheap way to go to conferences, and a nice way to share your experience, so simple, so easy.
People to follow on twitter, At the end, I got a bunch of new people to follow, some I had conversations with, some I wish I had time for having some conversations, but hey, time is a limited resource.
I also got some nice pictures that I've shared over here.
Uh, that counts more than three, I guess I got more out of this conference than I expected :)
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