Yesterday I was at Zagreb STC MeetUp #2. It was organized by Karlo Šmid at Ericsson Nikola Tesla.

After the first meetup (which was great) I thought the second one could be only worse. But to my great surprise, it was even better than the first one!

About ten of us appeared. Pizza was already there, so we started talking informally while eating pizza. (We even had a snack and refreshment sponsor, Calyx.)

Karlo brought a few books, I brought a few and we organized a little library. I think I got a pretty good deal, I borrowed a few good books:

• Perfect Software: And Other Illusions about Testing by Gerald M. Weinberg
• Lessons Learned in Software Testing by Cem Kaner, James Bach and Bret Pettichord
• Testing Computer Software, 2nd Edition by Cem Kaner, Jack Falk and Hung Q. Nguyen

(Book reviews coming soon.)

While we were still eating pizza, Karlo had a talk about The Grinder, a Java Load Testing Framework. After that I talked about Watir (automated testing that doesn’t hurt), Cucumber (making BDD fun) and Sikuli (automate anything you see) and how I use them together.

A really important part of every meetup are informal conversations in pairs or small groups, and we also had plenty of those.

A really good meetup. If you have a chance to attend the next one, I would highly recommend it.

I was at Software Testers Speak Up Meeting #1 yesterday at Ericsson Nikola Tesla (in Zagreb, Croatia). It was organized by Karlo Šmid.

It was a good meeting. About 15 of us showed up. We introduced ourselves, talked about what we do, asked questions… After and hour or two talking, pizza arrived but the discussions continued, sometimes in smaller groups or pairs. A really good meeting.

The next one will probably be at the same place in a month or two. We will probably have one or two short 10-20 minute talks the next time. I am really looking forward to it.

If you want to continue the discussion from the meeting, ping Karlo (@karlosmid) or me (@zeljkofilipin) at Twitter, join viaqa Google group or viaqa/Croatian Software Testing Network LinkedIn groups.

Update: Karlo wrote about the meeting too.

Yesterday I was at Ruby at Six #2 at Infinum (in Zagreb, Croatia), organized by Nikica Jokić. About 30 people showed up, like the last time.

There were 4 short talks about NoSQL by Damir Bulić, Coffescript by Josip Bišćan, backbone.js by Tomislav Capan, and Mislav Marohnić was supposed to talk about Git but I think he changed the title of his talk to “except on Internet Explorer“. (You had to be there.)

The talks were interesting, but even more interesting were informal conversations after the talks. There was also free homebrew beer. We went home after 10pm, I think that says how interesting the conversations were.

I think this was one of the best meetups I have ever been. The next one will be next month. I hope Ruby at Six will become a tradition.

If you want to continue the conversation, go to ruby-hr Google group or #rubyat6/#rubyatsix at Twitter.

A have written a lot about the conference at it’s web site, and I plan to write more soon, so if you are interested, visit viaqa 11 web site.

The most important lesson that I have learned there is that if you leave your laptop in a car, it could get stolen.

I took a few photos there, and I wanted to share them. Enjoy!

Yesterday I was at the first Ruby at Six, organized by Infinum.

About 30 people showed up. Everybody said a few words about themselves, we had a few home brew beers and talked informally.

I said a few words about the conference I am organizing, viaqa. The first day is general software testing topics, the second day is Watir Day. Price? Free!

If you want to continue the conversation, go to ruby-hr Google group or #rubyatsix at Twitter.

I was at CASE 22 conference this week. It was three day conference, but I was there only the last half of the last day, so I can not say a lot about it. So, I will just mention Davor Banović‘s talk on usability testing.

Since that is all I know, I talked about Watir.

It was “old school” conference, looks like I was the only one tweeting (#case22 at twitter.com and case22 at identi.ca).

Last week I was at ViaQA, small conference on software testing.

As usual, I was talking about Watir, and the rest of the speakers talked about integration testing, user interface testing, Microsoft tools for testing, open source tools for testing…

I have recorded a few podcasts (in Croatian), you can find them at the bottom of this post, or at Vidi Podkast. Only one podcast is published so far, I hope I will have some time in the next few weeks to publish them all. I will update this post when the podcasts are published.

We have started testers.shoutem.com micro blog before the conference, and you can take a look at #viaqa at twitter.com and viaqa at identi.ca.

My photos and Davor’s photos are available at Picasa Web Albums.

Podcasts (in Croatian):

Vidi Podkast #14 Davor Banović o ViaQA

I took a few photos, as usual:

For a long, long time I wanted to record 5-10 minute podcasts with speakers and visitors of a conference, and this time I did it! I have recorded 9 podcasts. The first is already published, I plan to publish one podcast a day, until all of them are published. The podcasts are published at Vidi Podkast, but you can listen to them here too. I will update the list as I publish the podcasts.

Feel free to publish the podcasts at your site, they are licensed under a Creative Commons license. I would prefer if you linked to my mp3 files and use the full URL, so I could track the number of downloads (that would save you some bandwidth too), but do what you think is the best.

Vidi Podkast #5: Florian Schießl on LiMux.

Vidi Podkast #6: Andrew Aksyonoff and on Sphinx.

Vidi Podkast #7: Harald Welte on gpl-violations.org and GSM security.

Podcasts in Croatian:

Vidi Podkast #8: Nikola Kapraljević o DORS/CLUC 2010

Vidi Podkast #9: Valent Turković o OpenStreetMap.

Vidi Podkast #10: Albert Novak o PulaFreeAir.

Vidi Podkast #11: Tonimir Kišasondi o sigurnim komunikacijama i tokenima.

Vidi Podkast #12: Vlatko Košturjak o DORS/CLUC 2010.

Vidi Podkast #13: Ivan Voras o NOSQL.