A tester (Ralu) walks into a pub – Testers’ Pub 2018

Hosting a community dedicated event in a pub has been a wonderful experience for our colleagues and a successful one in terms of local awareness.

Ralu was one of the yonderists in the Testing cluster who fell in love with the concept and with great enthusiasm and involvement, contributed to the success of Testers’ Pub #1.

Ralu Mihordea, QA Engineer @Yonder:

”The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself.” – Oscar Wilde 

Believing in this, we at Yonder wanted to share some testing knowledge in the community and this is how it began.

How did Testers Pub really start? Well… way back in September,  during my first week in Yonder, I heard about JS Pub. I immediately fell in love with the concept of an informal gathering held in a pub with the purpose of exchanging technical knowledge. So I started wondering if we can extend it to testing … and this is how it began. Time passed by and we found ourselves in December, in a meeting, in which we were planning the events we wanted to organize and to attend in 2018. I proposed hosting Testers’ Pub and guess what: everybody loved the idea! Now the hard part was to actually make it happen.

Being a tester, by instinct the first thing I did was to create a check list.

The recipe to success was: an awesome team, a common goal, great content, a kick ass location, an ideal date, a curious audience, … and a lot of extra hours of work ( more exactly 34 only in team meetings + all the individual work done by each of us).

Easy like a Sunday morning one would say. Let the good times roll!

Counter intuitively, it wasn’t all milk & honey. One of the challenges we faced, was that the team changed over time, but we managed to keep on track and deliver quality in the end, or at least that was the feedback we got from the participants after the event.

As mentioned before, I am a tester as well. However, for this event I had three different roles: organizer, MC and designer. I was really happy to have the opportunity to do work I love outside the testing context.

Ana, Razvan, Mihai and Adelina were working on their presentations, I was working on design. We also had  two „outsiders”, Mihaela who was there to give us her perspective outside the testing world, Cami who was busy promoting us and the event and Catalin for moral support.

From now on it was only smooth sailing. The team worked hard and with passion and the results were visible from one rehearsal to another. I was confident that everything will work as expected in the day of the event. That’s exactly how it was.

Working with people it’s always hard, but in the same time, very rewarding, especially when you are surrounded by a creative and motivated team, as I was.

To sum it up I feel lucky I had this experience and I can’t wait to participate in the next Testers’ Pub event.