Pre-CASTx18 meetup with Katrina Clokie

With Katrina Clokie being one of my invited keynotes for the CASTx18 conference, she kindly offered to give a meetup-style talk on the evening before the conference. After some searching around for a suitable venue, the AST kindly sponsored the event as part of their deal at the Langham Hotel so I could then advertise the event. I used a free Eventbrite account and easily sold out the meetup simply via promotion on Twitter and LinkedIn.

When it came to the evening of Tuesday 27th February, the lovely Flinders Room in the Langham had been nicely laid out and keen participants started arriving early and partaking of the fine food and beverages on offer. We left a good half-hour for people to arrive and network before kicking off the meetup at 6pm.

Ilari Henrik Aegerter formally initiated proceedings, starting with an acknowledgement of country to the traditional owners of the land on which the event was being held and then talking about the mission and activities of the AST. Next up, I introduced Katrina and she took the stage to a crowd of about 25 keen listeners.

Katrina spoke for about 45-minutes, sharing four first-person experience stories and referencing them back to her book, “A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps”. Her experience of working in a DevOps environment within a large bank has given her lots of opportunity to gain experience in different teams at different stages of their DevOps journey. She made a deliberate choice to include a story of failure too, always a good idea as there are often more learnings to be had from failure than success. Katrina’s easy presentation style makes her content both engaging and readily consumable, with great practical takeaways. The lengthy Q&A session after her talk indicated that many people found the content relevant and went away with ideas to try in their own workplaces.

We still had the room and catering for another half-hour or so after Katrina’s talk, so there were some excellent discussions and further questions for Katrina before we wrapped up. The feedback from participants was overwhelmingly positive, both in terms of the awesome content from Katrina’s talk and also the venue facilities, service & catering.

My personal thanks go to Katrina for offering to do a talk of this nature for the Melbourne testing community and also to the AST for making it happen within such a beautiful venue (with a big shout out to Valerie Gryfakis for doing all the leg work with the hotel).

(If you haven’t already bought a copy, Katrina’s book is an excellent resource for anyone involved in modern development projects, packed full of advice and examples, and is very reasonably priced – check it out on LeanPub. I’ve previously written a review of the book on this blog too.)