Due to popular demand I'm sharing my plans for the upcoming conference season. Here is a list of events I plan to visit and speak at (hopefully). The list will be updated throughout the year so please subscribe to the comments section to receive a notification when that happens! I'm open to meeting new people so ping me for a beer if you are attending some of these events!
02 February - Hack Belgium Pre-Event Workshops, Brussels
Note: added on Jan 12th
Last year I had an amazing time visiting an Elixir & Erlang workshop so I'm about to repeat the experience. I will be visiting a workshop organized by HackBelgium and keep you posted with the results.
03 February - Git Merge, Brussels
Note: added on Jan 12th
Git Merge is organized by GitHub and will be held in Brussels this year. I will be visiting only the conference track and hopefully giving a lightning talk titled Automatic upstream dependency testing with GitHub API! That and the afterparty of course!
04-05 February - FOSDEM, Brussels
FOSDEM is the largest free and open source gathering in Europe which I have been visiting since 2009 (IIRC). You can checkout some of my reports about FOSDEM 2014, Day 1, FOSDEM 2014, Day 2 and FOSDEM 2016.
I will present my Mutants, tests and zombies talk at the Testing & Automation devroom on Sunday.
UPDATE: Video recording is available here
I will be in Brussels between February 1st and 5th to explore the local start-up scene and get to meet with the Python community so ping me if you are around.
18 March - QA Challenge Accepted 3.0, Sofia
QA: Challenge Accepted is a specialized QA conference in Sofia and most of the sessions are in Bulgarian. I've visited last year and it was great. I even proposed a challenge of my own.
CFP is still open but I have a strong confidence that my talk Testing Red Hat Enterprise Linux the MicroSoft way will be approved. It will describe a large scale experiment with pairwise testing, which btw I learned about at QA: Challenge Accepted 2.0 :).
UPDATE: I will be also on the jury for QA of the year award.
UPDATE: I did a lightning talk about my test case management system (in Bulgarian).
07-08 April - Bulgaria Web Summit, Sofia
I have been a moderator at Bulgaria Web Summit for several years and this year is no exception. This is one of the strongest events held in Sofia and is in English. Last year over 60% of the attendees were from abroad so you are welcome!
I'm not going to speak at this event but will record as much of it as possible. UPDATE: Checkout the recordings on my YouTube channel!
10-12 May - Romanian Testing Conference, Cluj-Napoca
RTC'17 is a new event I found in neighboring Romania. The topic this year is Thriving and remaining relevant in Quality Assurance. My talk is titled Quality Assistance in the Brave New World where I'll share some experiences and visions for the QA profession if that gets accepted.
As it turned out I know a few people living in Cluj so I'll be arriving one day earlier on May 9th to meet the locals.
13-14 May - OSCAL, Tirana
Open Source Conference Albania is the largest OSS event in the country. I'm on a row here to explore the IT scene on the Balkans. Due to traveling constraints my availability will be limited to the conference venue only but I've booked a hotel across the street :).
I will be meeting a few friends in Tirana and hear about the progress of an psychological experiment we devised with Jona Azizaj and Suela Palushi.
Talking wise I'm hoping to get the chance of introducing mutation testing and even host a workshop on the topic.
UPDATE: Here is the video recording from OSCAL. The quality is very poor though.
20-21 May - DEVit, Thessaloniki
This is the 3rd edition of DEVit, the 360° web development conference of Northern Greece. I've been a regular visitor since the beginning and this year I've proposed a session on mutation testing. Because the Thessaloniki community seems more interested in Ruby and Rails my goal is to share more examples from my Ruby work and compare how that is different from the Python world. There is once again an opportunity for a workshop.
So far I've been the only Bulgarian to visit DEVit and also locally known as "The guy who Kosta & Kosta met in Sofia"! Checkout my impressions from DEVit'15 and DEVit'16 if you are still wondering whether to attend or not! I strongly recommend it!
UPDATE: I am still the only Bulgarian visiting DEVit!
22 May - Dev.bg, Sofia
I've hosted a session titled Quality Assurance According to Einstein for the local QA community in Sofia. Video (in Bulgarian) and links are available!
UPDATE: added post-mortem.
01-02 June - Shift Developer Conference, Split
Shift appears to be a very big event in Croatia. My attendance is still unconfirmed due to lots of traveling before that and the general trouble of efficiently traveling on the Balkans. However I have a CFP submitted and waiting for approval. This time it is my Mutation Testing in Patterns, which is a journal of different code patterns found during mutation testing. I have not yet presented it to the public but will blog about it sometime soon so stay tuned.
UPDATE: this one is a no-go!
03-04 June - TuxCon, Plovdiv
TuxCon is held in Plovdiv around the beginning of July. I'm usually presenting some lightning talks there and use the opportunity to meet with friends and peers outside Sofia and catch up with news from the local community. The conference is in Bulgarian with the exception of the occasional foreign speaker. If you understand Bulgarian I recommend the story of Puldin - a Bulgarian computer from the 80s.
UPDATE: I will be opening the conference with QA According to Einstein
17-18 June - How Camp, Varna
How Camp is the little brother of Bulgaria Web Summit and is always held outside of Sofia. This year it will be in Varna, Bulgaria. I will be there of course and depending on the crowd may talk about some software testing patterns.
UPDATE: it looks like this is also a no-go but stay tuned for the upcoming Macedonia Web Summit and Albania Web Summit where yours trully will probably be a moderator!
25-29 September - SuSE CON, Prague
Yeah, this is the conference organized by SuSE. I'm definitely not afraid to visit the competition. I even hope I could teach them something. More details are still TBA because this event is very close to/overlapping with the next two.
28-29 September - SEETEST, Sofia
South East European Software Testing Conference is, AFAIK, an international event which is hosted in a major city on the Balkans. Last year it was held in Bucharest with previous years held in Sofia.
In my view this is the most formal event, especially related to software testing, I'm about to visit. Nevertheless I like to hear about new ideas and some research in the field of QA so this is a good opportunity.
UPDATE: I have submitted a new talk titled If the facts don't fit the theory, change the facts!
30 September-1 October - HackConf, Sofia
HackConf is one of the largest conferences in Bulgaria, gathering over 1000 people each year. I am strongly affiliated with the people who organize it and even had the opportunity to host the opening session last year. The picture above is from this event.
The audience is still very young and inexperienced but the presenters are above average. Organizers' goal is HackConf to become the strongest technical conference in the country and also serve as a sort of inspiration for young IT professionals.
UPDATE: I have submitted both a talk proposal and a workshop proposal. For the workshop I intend to teach children Python and Selenium Automation in 8 hours. I've also been helping the organizers with bringing some very cool speakers from abroad!
October - IT Weekend, Bulgaria
IT Weekend is organized by Petar Sabev, the same person who's behind QA: Challenge Accepted. It is a non-formal gathering of engineers with the intent to share some news and then discuss and share problems and experiences. Checkout my review of IT Weekend #1 and IT Weekend #3.
The topic revolve around QA, leadership and management but the format is open and the intention is to broaden the topics covered. The event is held outside Sofia at a SPA hotel and makes for a very nice retreat. I don't have a topic but I'm definitely going if time allows. I will probably make something up if we have QA slots available :).
October - Software Freedom Kosova, Prishtina
Software Freedom Kosova is one of the oldest conferences about free and open source software in the region. This is part of my goal to explore the IT communities on the Balkans. Kosovo sounds a bit strange to visit but I did recognize a few names on the speaker list of previous years.
The CFP is not open yet but I'm planning to make a presentation. Also if weather allows I'm planning a road trip on my motorbike :).
UPDATE: I've met with some of the FLOSSK members in Tirana at OSCAL and they seem to be more busy with running the hacker space in Prishtina so the conference is nearly a no-go.
14-15 November - Google Test Automation Conference, London
GTAC 2017 will be held in London. Both speakers and attendees are pre-approved and my goal is to be the first Red Hatter and second Bulgarian to speak at GTAC.
The previous two years saw talks about mutation testing vs. coverage and their respective use to determine the quality of a test suite with both parties arguing against each other. Since I'm working in both of these fields and have at least two practical example I'm trying to gather more information and present my findings to the world.
UPDATE: I've also submitted my Testing Red Hat Enterprise Linux the Microsoft way
16-17 November - ISTA Con, Sofia
Innovations in Software Technologies and Automation started as a QA conference several years ago but it has broaden the range of acceptable topics to include development, devops and agile. I was at the first two editions and then didn't attend for a while until last year when I really liked it. The event is entirely in English with lots of foreign speakers.
Recently I've been working on something I call "Regression Test Monitoring" and my intention is to present this at ISTA 2017 so stay tuned.
UPDATE: I didn't manage to collect enough information on the Regression Test Monitoring topic but have made two other proposals.
Thanks for reading and see you around!
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