TL: DR Seetest 2018 happened in Belgrade, Serbia. A beautiful city worth visiting. The conference was, but my selection of talks wasn’t lucky.
Bellow full relation.

Charm of Belgrade 

This year Seetest was in Belgrade, Serbia. The city was charming I like how familiar and yet foreign it was for me a fellow Slav.
Here are my three observation about Belgrade and its people:

• They love chocolate – especially Nuttela. It’s everywhere.
• They love pizza – If in your sight there is no pizza venue you probably left the urban area.
• Traffic light and road rules are more of a suggestion – not even guideline. Seriously the traffic is crazy here.

Another mind-blowing thing I learned from locals:
It’s hard to find the city that had more wars happening on its territory. In its history, around 120 battles occurred here. Moreover, it was razed to the ground more than 40 times!

Let’s talk SEETEST

The actual first day was for tutorials.
Each of us could go for two half-day long tutorials
I planned to go for „Requirements Engineering for Testers ” and „Load & Performance: Basic practical principles”.
As much as I love the idea of tutorials it impossible to execute them properly when you have more than 100 people in the room.
Room setup: classroom style with a 6-person long table wasn’t helping.

During the first day, I have met my session chair Maria and coworker Theodora. Both are great people I am happy to meet. Thanks to them I had a blast at a social party, and I enjoyed my self on my second day of the conference.

The social event was in the evening was lovely. However, I will never understand why they put a loud band which made talking impossible in Networking EVENT. Seriously why?

Presentation Day

The second day was the day of talks and same as with TestCamp
I won’t go „talk by talk”.  I think the best way to sum up this day is text I have a few times over the conference: „too many generic talks.”

For Example

There was standard talk about biases, and if you read Think fast and slow, there was nothing there for you. The presentation itself was mostly a distillation of the book. It was well presented but content wise it was same old.
It was enjoyable to which when presenters put this video up. More then half of the audience wasn’t amused because they have seen it before (Some even just a day before).

Talk of the day.

For me, Talk of the day was Anton Angelov with his „Infinite Improbability Testing- Execute All Tests in Parallel.”
I mention it before; I am great fan of Anton work, His blog Automate the planet is a constant source of inspiration for me. I am delighted that I was able to see his presentation – and he did great.
It was a well-researched case study, about running parrel testing.
It was well-done presentation the only issue I have is – you could feel that it is a little too much promotion of his product. At first, I thought it was my bias, but people next to me said the same.
However, it doesn’t change one fact. Anton still did the best presentation I was in.

There were great presentations

Of course, there were great talks I wasn’t going to because I have seen them before mostly. For example:

• Marcin Sikorski „Internet of Things – a tsunami that will kill testers.”
• Mirjana Kolarov „Balancing your test automation with exploratory testing” – I have written about it in my AAdays 2017 report.
  

My Talk

My talk went well but I was the last talk, and I had sth like 15 people in the audience.
Teodora which was in past working in Customer Support gave me a good summary. For her, there wasn’t anything new there – but that was the message that many people should hear. Moreover, she was annoyed that they weren’t there to listen to it.

It made me do some thinking:

I think we all have a problem with echo chamber instead of going for talk about something we like to go for the subjects we have already some knowledge.
Moreover, Looking back at my choices I had also fallen in that trap. I will try to be bolder in selecting a presentation to go on my next events.

It was a good event

So my overall opinion – It may seem That I am overly critical, but I had fun it was a friendly event, but the devil is in the detail and lot of them didn’t work well. Lately, conferences for me are about networking and meeting people, and this one was the same. Maria, Teodora, Anton and a few other made this event great for me. Unfortunately, I am disappointed by the most track I went on.

That all for now Next time you will see me in Ryga. If you want to read other relations click here.

And What about you? Did you go to some conferences lately?