We first went to Barcelona to Test Academy, a nice one day event where we had the chance to meet Maaret Pyhäjärvi, Dan Billing, Almudena Vivanco ...
We flew to Helsinki to attend European Testing Conference.
MC got a ticket thanks to a Whiteboard Testing video contest, and I gave a talk explaining how our winter peak had been.
Fiona Charles gave a very interesting workshop about leadership, at least for me, since I had been involved on the hiring process for the last months, and I felt like I had a lot to learn there.
Some months after this, it became clear that the company didn't want me for a leadership role, but these learnings remain in your bag and you never know what the future will be like.
Since flywire is getting bigger every year, we though that it would be nice to hang out all flymates together, so we went to Marrakesh for an all-company gathering.
In March, we flew to London with the kids, a chance to stroll down the streets of the City, visit the British Museum and the HMS Belfast.
I had to skip TestBash Brighton, but that wasn't that bad since Tomislav went there and explained to all of us how it went on our TestNight.
After reading Becoming a Technical Leader from Jerry Weinberg, I recorded a video about where ideas come from.
I went to Stockholm for the final edition of Let's Test.
The mood of the conference was a bit low, since it was the last happening of this event, but we did have some fine workshops, Specially the one about code refactoring from Katrina Clokie and the one about web page testing by Alan Richardson
We did a weekend trip to Canfranc, probably Europe's most awesome train station. I can not imagine how well this masterpiece of architecture would have been preserved if it was built in France or England. Sadly in Spain we prefer to invest in Calatrava rather than preserve our heritage.
Before summer, we realised that with three testers we weren't enough for testing everything, so we opened a job offer...
The Engineering team did a public speaking workshop, and even that I wasn't delivering any talk, I managed to join by recording the talks and taking some pictures.
And since everybody was in the talk delivery mode, I recorded a talk (In Spanish) explaining what you get out from Exploratory Testing and Automated Tests, what is the difference and why you should care about both.
Another trip to the Pyrenees, and this time my kids wanted to test the boundary about being in just one country at the time. Here they stand with their left feet in Spain, while their right one is in France!
Starting Summer, we rented a second bike, and went our for a ride. Valencia - Utiel - Ademuz - Salvacañete - Teruel - Valencia. More than 400 km of wineyards, forests, rocky mountains... pure awesomeness.
I went back to London for the Tester Gathering Workshops. This time I learnt about Cynefin, How to tell stories, What Blockchain is all about and what is Amazon web services, what Lambdas, Buckets, S3, SNS, SQS, SWF... and all this SRE lingo stands for.
The summer holidays were spent on a Family roadtrip from Valencia all the way up to Denmark. Two weeks across France and Germany so that we would have plenty of time to walk and discover the places where we were stopping for the night.
Back to work, Tomislav and I we went back to Denmark for the Copenhagen Context Conference. We delivered a talk about how we are creating a testing community out of nothing in Valencia, what worked and what didn't work. Also, helping Morten Hougaard with his conference was a great pleasure since this conference has been a turning point for the career of both of us.
We went to the local testing conference VLC Testing. And apart of observing how well the testing community is growing in Valencia, we got the chance to listen to Claudia Badell explaining their approach to Testing.
I recorded a short video introducing the Cynefin framework (In Spanish) just for the fun of it.
And for closing the year, after one of those weeks where you live in the office, I decided to get some family points back and we went to Karlsruhe (Germany) to a Music festival, to see Hammerfall perform live.
I started this blog back in 2012, after a post by Pradeep about why a tester should blog, and for my very first post I used a phrase from Joacim Cans, the singer of the band, that he said back in 2003.
The band has evolved in these 15 years, their presence on stage is more mature, more coordinated, more powerful, and at the same time they keep interacting with the audience and having fun.
It was nice to see them again, it was nice to be there with my wife, we should repeat this from time to time.
2017 has been a great year, let's see what we get out of 2018.
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