This is a short review of the splendid inaugural TestBash Germany conference. Or you could also say that this is the story of how “I wonder what CFP works like” became standing on stage and giving a talk at a testing conference for the first time ever.

Manchester 2016 was my first TestBash ever and it was an awesome experience, well, if you exclude being drugged because of a herniated disk. So when news spread that there was going to be a TestBash Germany, it was a no-brainer that I would attend, despite the Lederhosen and Dirndl topic! Anyway, I had been thinking a while about answering a CFP just to get some experience in that and see if there was some interest out there in topic I might talk about. So when the Munich deadline was looming, I remembered Helena Jeret-Mäe had written a piece on writing conference proposals, read that again, took as much advise as I could, answered all the questions over at Ministry of Testing and didn’t really expect anything when I submitted. I saw this more of a learning experience, see how it works, get some feedback maybe. Two months later I got this:

I was very surprised and excited at that moment, but damn, things are getting real now! The hardest part was not to tell anyone until things were officially announced a few weeks later. But hey, I used the time to think over what I was going to talk about. Communication with Richard, Patrick and Kristine was pretty smooth, giving you all the support you could ask for. And it turned out that I had written my abstract way too detailed, so that I had to shorten it a bit. But on the other hand I was able to use that as a skeleton for my talk, which I could build up on. Without getting into too much detail on the talk itself (go and see it on the Dojo! Or go and see the slides here), my advise is to take your time, be cool and prepare in time, especially if you depend on anything from others…like pictures in my case, which I didn’t get until very, very late. And oh, go and give a sneak preview of your talk somewhere, I did that for some colleagues at work (we are hiring btw) and got some awesome feedback which I incorporated, most importantly time-management. I wanted to be at 25 minutes, ended up at 21 minutes in the preview session and was able to get to 24 minutes at TestBash itself. Which was a good thing, so that everyone was able to ask questions to get into the break on time.

As for the event itself, well, it was awesome of course. Great talks (go and see them on the Dojo!), great people and some great organization. I was able to talk to familiar faces, get to finally know some people I only knew from twitter and meet some people I had never seen before. There were really a lot of people for whom it was the first testing conference ever. You guys certainly decided for the right one and I am certain to be back next year. If you want to see all the great pictures, go to twitter and see #oktobertest.

Fellow speakers Lisi and Viktor wrote awesome reviews of their own, so be sure to check those out as well!