- I got a badge for a popular link on the Club. This means that a link suggested by me, was clicked at least 50 times.
- And a a second popular link.
- The last years I gained a lot of experience with Exploratory Testing. The elements used were also applicable for maintaining my mailbox settings. I might call it Exploratory Maintaining.
- This summer I was on a fishing ship where a dragnet was used for educational purposes. The catch was discussed and thrown back in the sea. During the same trip I saw a seal.
- This year I started to listen to the spoken books of Ranger’s Apprentice. It gave me something to talk about with my kids. I could ask about honey in coffee.
- This spring I started to read two books at the same time. This led to the following coincidence. In an audio book Maddy is exploring hostile grounds, while Will Treaty is distracting people. In a braille book Mary Russell is exploring hostile grounds, while Sherlock Holmes is distracting a group of people. Both ladies accomplished their mission.
- One moment I was reading a braille book and the next moment I was using a bow and arrow. My kids paid attention in case I missed something. I mean the right target.
- This year I received my first braille letter.
- This autumn I was invited to talk about accessibility. It was for board game developers during a board game developer meeting.
- The post delivered one of the biggest books I ever ordered. It was more than 40 centimetres thick. Braille tends to take up a lot of space.
- This year I got an invitation for a birthday party for a foundation. I was addressed as one of the founders. This might be something for my LinkedIn profile.
- That founder story made me thinking. If I was a member of the first board, then I was a founder. I remembered another foundation with a first-time board membership from my side. So, I could update my LinkedIn profile with a double founder title. As a Dutchman I declined to do this.
Category Archives: Learning
Things Which Were Not On My 2021 Bingo Card
- In spring I wrote my first in depth security blog post about XML injection. This was a challenge to write for people with no knowledge about XML and SQL injection.
- This year I wrote an accessibility blog post, which drew more visitors than the previous security blog post. Accessibility rules
- For the first time I got to Diamond Tier level 3 in MTG Arena.
- I like Exploratory Testing, but sometimes it is useful to have a script in place.
- For the first time I appeared in a podcast. It was about accessibility. Please have a listen.
- Also for the first time, I was in a promotion video for a conference, Diversity on a conference is a lot more than “Look, everyone can send a proposal”. I am the guy using Dutch Sign Language.
- With a lot of help I programmed a shortcut on my iPhone. I can use Siri to execute this shortcut.
For the people who like programming the language is understandable. For the people using test automation it is a bit strange to add wait commands.
- This year I used NVDA, a screen reader, to check whether my blog is accessible for people with visual disabilities.
- My most amazing discovery is, that VoiceOver has a rotor. VoiceOver is written as voice with capital V, immediately followed by over with capital O.
VoiceOver is a screen reader for the iPhone, which helps people with bad sight to use the phone. The rotor is a button which appears while turning 2 or 3 fingertips on the screen.
- This year I was a frequent participant of CoffeeOps London. The main focus is on DevOps. Among other subjects were communication, metrics, and testing. It was and is a safe environment.
- I earned a Respected badge on The Club of Ministry of Testing. At the moment of this blog, I was one of 19.
- HTML is used for websites. If it is properly used, then it makes a website more accessible. In April I received mails for free after signing up for 30 days of HTML.
- In the past I could be really upset by errors in my blogs posts. This year I was able to shrug them off.
- On the first day of this year, I got feedback about my blog post about the Agile Manifesto. It was a nice comment from one of the people who signed it.
The Clokie Project
In December 2018 Katherina Clokie, a known speaker, announced to look more outside the Tester community.
My reaction
Amazement, grief.
After a few months I realised that it was not a bad idea.
My change of heart
My wife has some really tough questions I have to answer. The biggest one is:
“What did you learn?”
Right behind each test conference.
So I reduced my number of test conferences and number of hours at the conferences. There are still some really good conferences like TestBash, Agile Testing Days, and European Testing Conference with plenty of awesome few insights.
I attended a lot of other conferences and after a while I would be just happy to pick up something new.
There is more to gain at a conference if you only know the basics. With more than 20 years of experience it is a way less.
It was time for my Clokie project.
Time for a small flashback to October and November 2018. I already had looked outside the Test Community.
Here are some notes from Infosecurity 2018:
In case of doubt treat data as personal data. Zip code and house number are personal data.
In EU there are several privacy government organisations, but they have different focus on privacy issues.
Steps in case of data breach:
Secure proof
Look in the logging
Determine scope
Communicate
Remediate
Learn
A change of behaviour can indicate an identity theft.
The way of accessing data in the cloud is the weakest link.
In GDPR, the European Privacy Law, a penalty is used to let the company feel the pain instead of putting a company out of business.
GDPR is not applicable for dead persons. But there can be other laws which are applicable for dead persons.
Meet the expos
How to attract people to an expo? Goodies, free access, and talks.
Some Healthcare and ICT notes of me in random order
Anonymize pictures, determine objects of interest, and annotate them using smart software.
First step is vision and then involve stakeholders like care providers, health insurers, and suppliers.
Patient panel discovered that 60 % of the patients want a personal health environment.
Care providers like hospitals and doctors are stimulated. They get money on basis of results and not on actions taken.
Law of customer’s rights. E.g. A care provider should only get information which is needed for the care to be provided.
Misconfiguration is becoming the weakest point in defense.
Meet the meetups
010dev is a small meetup in Rotterdam. It has Dutch characteristics like gezellig (cosy) and Buy Own Drink. It is in a pub after all. Once in a whole while it is in a company.
During my meetups there are no lectures, but I still listened a lot. As a tester was I am able to follow the small talk and tech talk?
In a few hours a lot of subjects passed. Programming languages, projects, and new trends were discussed. Somehow I could understand bits and pieces.
Developers.nl had a more traditional format for the meetup: free drinks, free meals, and free lectures.
I went to two meetups. The first one was abstract. It was about architecture. What are good guiding principles to set up a complex environment?
The second meetup was about vue.js. This was a challenging one. I had only basic knowledge about JavaScript and HTML. So I read some ebooks about vue.js which are based on these languages.
This talk was more understandable for me. The speaker shared some tips about vue.js.
How to speed up the performance by loading the needed content in 2 stages? First the necessary stuff was loaded for the web page. The rest followed while the user had a first impression of the page.
Looking under the hood
My blog has been made with WordPress. One day I was blogging and a conference in Rotterdam was announced in the dashboard.
There were some particular benefits: 25 Euro for a ticket including lunch, an environment friendly environment, meeting other WordPress users, short traveling distance.
As a tester I had not had a chance to attend a talk about accessibility. I honestly don’t understand this.
This conference offered more talks about this subject than I could process. I skipped the last ones.
Another interesting subject was security headers. It is possible to make WordPress secure. I was thinking that a header only contained some information.
For the interested reader have a look at my conference digest mind map.
Finishing thoughts
Retro: did I learn more than previous years?
Yes.
But what did I pick up in those previous years?
Mostly subjects related to programming and law. Less about testing.
Just made me think.
On Twitter Trish Koo placed a thought provoking tweet. In order to become better in software development you have to learn both testing and programming.