The Nominations for our Software Meetup Hero Competition have come to a close. We had so many wonderful entries with testers looking to salute their Meetup Heroes.

We’ve narrowed it down to our Top 7 Nominees!

One of these lucky people will win 4 FREE Tickets to UKSTAR This February – 1 for themselves, 1 for the person that took the time to nominate them and put in wonderful effort making their case and 2 to give to whomever they want to join them.

We’ve condensed the winning entries into a few bullet points so you can see just how amazing these nominees are!

Voting closes 21st of December so Hurry!

We will announce the overall winner December 25th Via Email

Best of Luck to all of our Nominees!

 

Emma Keaveny 

Brighton and Hove Test Meetup

Nominated By Kim Knup

• She is great at making people feel welcome and comfortable.
• She helps find speakers and venues and sponsors.
• Her enthusiasm is infectious and always inspires at least me to do better, although I am sure many have been infected by her positivity.
• Emma also created a Facebook page for our meet up and tweets regularly about the events we have planned, sharing her excitement about being able to meet new people and learn something at the same time.
• Her positive attitude makes everyone feel excited about testing and learning, which has resulted in a great mix of regular attendees.
• She will ask questions during the talks we organise to get the conversation started and never turns down to carry the conversations on in the pub afterwards.
• Only recently has she made the transition to testing (in 2014 actually) and has taken to it like a fish to water, getting stuck into the wider testing community from day one.
• Even though she lives an hour one way bus ride away from where we host the tester meet ups she is always there and always on point, being friendly, networking and asking questions.
• One particular awesome event she organised was our “testing games”. Emma brought a tonnes of fun puzzles and games and organised a low key event in the pub, setting up an ice breaker followed by challenging games that got everyone talking and thinking. She was an awesome game show host so to speak. 😀

“Emma has also gone out of her way to support me in my speaking endeavours listening to my talks and reviewing slides, which I am eternally grateful for.” 

Without her we would not have the Brighton and Hove tester meet up.

 

 

Oana Casapu 

TABARA DE TESTARE

Nominated By Dolly Pente

• Oana Casapu is one the most active people in the testing community from Romania that I know.
• With her dedication, she makes lots of testing events happen and she works to make the community stronger.
• Oana is working in her free time so that all these events happen.
• She helps the content owner with a review for his presentation or workshop, gives feedback on the content, helps with the location for the meetup, spreads the news and invites people to the event, brings only healthy snacks and drinks and also provides anything else that the content owner needs.
• She also organises meetups that have a different format: testing clinics, beer with the fellow testers, full day workshops, testing challenges etc.
• Oana is one of the main organizers of the Testing Autumn Camp.
• Oana is working all year to find a suitable location for such an event, searches for volunteers for different workshops and creates multiple tracks for these, searches for sponsors, transportation, and fun activities. Once she has found enough content owners for the Autumn Camp, she helps them create and improve their workshop.
• While she stopped participating as a content owner after a while, she always made herself available for questions we had, and guided us by giving feedback, and helped us change our approach based on participants’ needs.

“I held my first workshop at Tabara de Testare, with the help of Oana. Thanks to her, having a workshop in this community has opened a new path for me: being comfortable to share my knowledge with others at different conferences! I always wanted to do this, but I didn’t have the courage. Today, with her support, my colleague, Elena, and I already held the workshop in 3 different locations and in December we’re going to have the fourth event.”

she always wants the best for the TdT members.

 

Alexandru Rotaru 

TABARA DE TESTARE

Nominated By Levi Balint

• Alex is one of the first people to organise testing workshops in 4 major cities in Romania.
• He and a small group of testers put together the whole thing, they talked to the would-be participants from each city, offered feedback for each report, facilitated the events, and even maintained a relationship with the participants after the workshop had ended. This is how they sowed the seeds that ultimately lead to what Tabara de Testare is today, a place where people come together to share their experience and stories.
• He always seems to be in a good mood, cracking jokes and making small observations which are meant to lighten moods.
• I would argue that without his dedication and huge time investment, the testing scene in Romania would look very different indeed.
• During our meet-ups he generally likes to share his testing stories with anyone willing to listen, but at the same time he is very curious about other testers’ experiences as well.
• He also knows how to listen carefully, and tries to ask questions where he feels he didn’t understand the speaker’s point.
• When he doesn’t agree with some idea or point of view, he tries to highlight this by providing arguments fueled by his experience. He isn’t shy about adopting other people’s ideas and points of views if he gets to try them out.

I remember one time during a test clinic we did, he offered to start the conversation by sharing a problem he was facing with a fellow tester who had a very narrow view on his testing role within the team, causing him to get demotivated easily. Alex offered some advice on how to view his situation differently, offered to point him in the direction of self actualization (as a tester) but nothing he tried seemed to work.

So he looked to us for advice, which showed me that he not only trusts in our judgement, but also isn’t afraid of being seen as vulnerable.

 

Leigh Rathbone 

Liverpool Tester Gathering

Nominated By Eleanor Firth

• Leigh Rathbone lives and breathes the Meetup ethos.
• Not only does he organize the sponsors he also organises snacks ( the best pizza 🍕) and the speakers.
• He is also one of the most enthusiastic hosts you could encounter.
• He has paid his own money to fund any shortfall in this Meetup, which is a sign for his passion for test.
• This Meetup regular has attendance in excess of 100 people on the night and streams the event real time.
• Leigh is able to connect people through his enthusiasm for Meet up.
• We at Shop Direct have found a wider outlet via Leigh’s promotion of events, to help expand our knowledge through local Test, Agile , Big Data and Developer Meetups.

 

I can’t think of anyone more deserving of being the Meetup Super Hero.

Through this meet up local test teams have found a voice , a community and a passion for sharing knowledge

 

James Thomas 

Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing

Nominated By Karo Stoltzenburg

• His involvement in the Software Testing Community in Cambridge has made a real impact to me, and I believe also to others.
• I’s to participate while also lending active personal support and mentorship.
• It’s particular impressive how he encourages others to share their thoughts and experiences on software testing, to present ideas and topics as well as organise and run Meetups and workshops for the local tester community.
• He’s also very much engaged in the community himself, be it as a regular host at Linguamatics for the Software Testers Meetups, by contributing as a speaker numerous times, through his general support and feedback in organisation and shape of Meetups and by his fundamental help in bringing external speakers in.
• He’s the founder and co-organiser of the Cambridge Exploratory Workshop on Testing which in it’s definition is all about the local tester community, welcoming other testers as peers.
• These values shine through his actions and engagement at these events, which create an ongoing and safe environment for testers to develop and share ideas, to connect with others and grow in their own role as testers.It’s just a real pleasure to interact with James, a real benefit to have someone around of his experience and knowledge and his willingness to share, listen and support! I’ve seen him to be an encouragement for new testers to connect with the software testing community. 

 

Tony Bruce 

London Tester Gathering

Nominated By Sharath Byregowda

• To me London Tester Gathering from Tony Bruce is not just a meetup but an arboretum to share, learn, challenge, new ideas.
• It is also a great place to endorse your colleagues for their future roles.
• The emphasis is on peer recognition.
  • One such example was Michael Bolton endorsing me at London Tester Gathering back in 2010 which kick-started my career in the UK.
• New speakers are constantly encouraged.
• May be it’s because it’s in a pub, or may be it’s because everyone by then have had couple of pints. I have never come across a very nervous speaker 😀
• Every London Tester Gathering brings in new faces which by itself is amazing and a massive boost to our community.
• It’s fun and free and swift and have this thin line of being casual and formal meetup.

Tony to me should get a lot of credit for keeping London Tester Gathering going and keeping it fresh year after year.

Thank you very much for London Tester Gathering Tony.

 

Hugh McCamphill 

Belfast Selenium Meetup

Nominated By Tam Mullen

• It would be difficult enough to have just 1 or 2 meetups a year in a small community like Belfast especially for a specialist area like test automation but Hugh has managed to organise 14
• Very well attended meetups since 2013 with a mix of local and international speakers and a wide variety of topics
• The spread of topics again is an achievement when dealing with a specialist area
• He always encourages new speakers as well attracting established industry speakers.
• The variety and freshness of the meetup is what keeps attendees returning time and time again.

Making the meetup an integral part of the Belfast tech community.

 

Voting has now Closed. Winners will be announced 25th December via Email

Best of Luck to all our nominees!