Finding the Value in Blogging as a Tester
on Learning, Blog
Today I will be talking to myself to try and answer the question: why blog?
‘Strange question’ you may say since I’ve gone ahead and made a blog and everything - but is it? You may have seen in my first post I planned to write about automating a legacy codebase and working with async/await… but those posts haven’t appeared yet. Have I started writing them? Kinda. But they’re currently a mix of abstract thoughts in my head and snippets of anecdotes that I need to make more digestible.
So in the meantime what else can I write about? Should I have even bothered setting this blog up if I had nothing to put in it? Interesting question. I suppose my wish to make a blog came from the following:
I don’t want to feel like a cog in a machine
Not sure if this is a common feeling, but without even a potential space for commentary and introspection about my experiences in software testing the pursuit would seem mechanical to me. Clock in, find bugs, clock out, repeat until insane.
I want to create the sort of content I’d want to read
I am a big fan of Alan Richardson’s ‘Java For Testers’ and (parts of) David Haeffner’s Selenium Guidebook series because they created content that’s by testers, for testers. There’s a lot of ‘stuff’ out there for developers we can co-opt as being useful or relevant to us, but less that I consider purely ‘for’ testers - or that spoke in a way I could understand, at least. Essentially, I am hoping that there’s a copy of me somewhere who is maybe a few years behind in his career that will someday find this blog incredibly useful.
I want to engage in the community
I’m part of the online testing community on Twitter, Slack and Ministry of Testing. By and large I feel like I have something to add to this space and this is just another medium to do it. Simultaneously the community has a heck of a lot more that it can add to me in how I approach and conduct testing, so with any luck in time this space will gather a bit of interest, some comments and I can lean where people agree/disagree with me and how they would improve/change
