Ways & Places to Learn: Hackdays

There will be a hack day tomorrow, just before the Euruko 2012 and I think events like this are a great opportunity to learn no matter whether you’re a programmer, tester or (visual) designer. I find it fascinating to see how other people approach tasks, be it programming, testing or something unrelated to software development.

Here are a few ideas I have, about what to do…

  • Work on something that bugs (sic) me for a while now… could be a Sinatra or Rails app — or maybe something entirely different.
  • Offer a testers point of view to whoever asks about it. Just ask me (@S_2K on Twitter).
  • Work on some entirely new (to me) topic.

What would your choice be? Do you make plans about events like this? What are your expectations?

Sources of Learning

Over at Jeroen Mengerink’s blog (and there’s the 1st of the sources to learn from) he talks about learning (and the lack thereof) of people in testing. Given the topic list of this blog “On Testing, Patterns and Learning”, this topic is very interesting to me, too.

I recently attended a Scrum Training and one of the group exercises was to suggest ways to implement certain practices we were given. One of the topics was “focus on both, technical excellence and good design, fosters agility” (my translation, the training was held in German). I started filling the spot for possible immediate actions on the board: Conferences, user group meetings, books, blogs, podcasts… at which point a colleague stopped me, so others could add to it. However they didn’t.

So, if you’re looking for information about testing here are some recommendations I have, for today let’s cover the letter ‘B’ 😉

Jeroen also mentioned conferences and especially a presentation by Alan Richardson (@EvilTester on Twitter): Please go to Jeroen’s post and read it, then watch Alan’s presentation, both are really recommended stuff.

For now, I’d love to hear what book(s) and/or blog(s) you recommend that helped you learning about testing or improving your testing.

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