Resumé 2012

Since a couple of years I write a resumé on my life at the end of the year. This year I hesitated but waiting for midnight seems to yield some time for a last blog entry this year.

Why I hesitated? I consider the year for my personal life as the worst I ever had. It was riddled with losses, bad decisions, lots of stress, a bad knee and things I'd rather not write or think about again. I learned a lot. Hopefully I can use my learnings for better years in the future.

But there was also my business life and lots of people I got to know. In my company we had 30 days this year at free disposal which we call slack time on top of paid time off. Their purpose is mostly learning and innovation. I don't think I did much on the innovation part but I surely spent some time on learning.

I spent about 40% of my paid slacktime for anything in testing. Conferences (Let's Test in Stockholm, GATE-Workshop in Munich, Potslghtning in Potsdam, Agile Testing Days in Potsdam), Courses with James Bach (Critical Thinking for Software Testers) and Michael Bolten (Rapid Software Testing), a Testautomation Coderetreat (in Munich with my colleague Markus Gärtner) and testing-related hospitations with Markus but on top of that I had lots and lots of insightful talks with him and some other guys who I will mention again later.

As I like Kanban since it gave my work some stimulus I spent some time (about 12% of my slack) with Kanban as conferences, meetings, and on top of that I finished the translation of Personal Kanban into German (the book will be published in January).

In contrast to Markus I didn't read any specialist book apart from Personal Kanban in the course of the translation. I began a lot and didn't finish any. That's definetely something to change for 2013. I read a lot of blogs instead and returned to Twitter late in the year, which I abandoned most of the time since I work for it-agile and seem to have enough information even for me as a "black hole of information" as my mother calls me.

And finally I started this blog. I wrote an article for our customer magazine and helped Markus with some others.

But the best thing about 2012 were certainly the people.

I'm really thankful for many of them because they kept me going in a hard time.

First of all, Markus Gärtner who challenged me in so many ways and on whom I can bank. Thank you Markus!

Then my colleagues Henning Wolf and Bernd Schiffer and many of the others.

And finally there is a great community around testing I was honored to meet this year. And some I couldn't meet but who influenced my life also this year. On of the latter is Elisabeth Hendrickson who got me into testing with her Google Tech Talk which came so persuading, sensible and logically to me. She is one of the few I couldn't meet until now. But there's still time.

The others are (in no particular order and surely with some missing):

Ilari Henrik Aegerter, James Bach, Michael Bolton, Matt Heusser, Jean-Paul Varwijk, Huib Schoots, Sigurdur Birgisson, Scott Barber, Janet Gregory, Lisa Crispin, Ola Hyltén †, Aleksandar Simic, Ben Kelly, Paul Holland, Henke Andersson, Oliver Vilson, Xu Yi, David Evans, Pete Walen and Jokin Aspiazu. Thank you for your inspiration!

For the next year I planned at least three things: Translate Explore it!, get my knee cured and read more specialist books.

So let's start :o)