CAST 2011, General Observations

I'm writing this the evening of Wednesday, August 10.  This is the evening after the Workshop day of CAST 2011 in Seattle.  Overall, this has been an amazing experience.  The whole experience was highly rewarding in many ways. 

James and John Bach took an unconventional approach to putting together the program.  Speakers were chosen on reputatuon, not on submission topic.  Yeah, it was different.  At the same time, I had the opportunity to work closely with Matt Heusser on putting together the Emerging Topics track.  This was a cool idea, an experiment, and overall, it came off well.

Another experiment was the live webcasting of the keynotes, the ET sessions, lightning talks and "tester interviews."  The discussions were astoinding - no experiment there - certainty was closer to it.  I personally appreciate the great conversations Neil Thompson, Bill Matthews, Fiona Charles, Paul Holland, Dawn Haynes (who is a terrific person and hard worker who does not get nearly enough credit for making things just work)

Oh - I met more people from Sweeden at a testing conference this year than I can imagine!

OK, other people I met whom I have not mentioned - yeah, there were a stack, but these stood out ... Lets see - Christin Wiedemann was in my class today, then - sitting behind me, and next to Michael Hunter was Cathy McBride.  Oh!  Another Alex Bantz was also there.

I had the pleasure of helping with the EdSIG meeting and looking for ways to get the people who were interested in helping in the SIG, and getting involved in BBST, actually involved and active,  The thing is, this is also the same central idea behind keeping any non-profit, volunteer organization - finding tasks that need to be done, matching them up with people with the skills and interest in doing them, and matching them up. 

My experience in Michael Bolton's Test Framing workshop really deserves its own post.  For now, suffice to say it was interesting.

I had intended to decompress, have a quite dinner then get some work done.  Instead, after finishing an adult beverage, as my "take out" dinner was about to come out, Selene Deliesie, Lynn McKee and Nancy Kelln walked into the restaraunt.  What could I do?  We sat down, enjoyed a meal together and had a fantastic conversation. 

Now, it is very late, I'm remarkably tired and have more thoughts running through my head from the last three days and looking forward to more general thought absorption, internalization and a little sight-seeing tomorrow before heading home.

Thank you Seattle and AST for an amazing experience.