A year off giving conference presentations

Having just received a rejection from my only pending CFP submission, 2019 will likely be the first year since 2013 where I don’t give a conference presentation.

It’s always disappointing when the effort of crafting a talk in response to a CFP doesn’t result in the opportunity to give the talk, but my strike rate over the last few years has been pretty good and I’m grateful for the awesome opportunities I’ve been afforded by events in New Zealand, Sweden, Estonia, Vietnam, US and Australia.

As anyone who’s prepared and given a conference talk will know, there’s a lot of time and effort involved – from crafting a CFP submission, to refining the story, building a slide deck, performing some practice runs, travelling to the event (especially from somewhere as a remote as Australia!), and actually delivering the talk. In the absence of this work, I’m looking forward to putting more effort into my community projects as well as kicking off a new testing-related personal project very soon.

In the short term, though, my focus is on the Testing in Context Conference Australia coming up in Melbourne at the end of February. It’s great to be working with Paul Seaman and the Association for Software Testing on this event and I’m really looking forward to putting on a great show, as well as meeting up with old friends from the testing community and hopefully making some new ones as we come together to learn, share and enjoy the company of great testers from around the world.

(There’s still plenty of time to register for the conference and the pre-conference workshops, all the details can be found at http://ticca19.org.)