PlayTime 019: Puzzle36

We'll gather on Zoom / Miro, on Thursday 12 June at 3pm London time (local time for you) to play with Puzzle36.

I know last week's was serial number 020 – I accidentally skipped 019. Using 019 is an indication that uniqueness is more useful to me here than ordering. It also appears that I abhor a gap. Not that you'd know that from my puzzle numbering, but that's another story...

These exercises are for everyone, for free. Paying Subscribers get to play together every week. This week's is open to subscribers and friends. Subscribers will see joining info below. Pop your name on the Miro board if you're coming.

In other news:

• Last week's double-length "deep dive" interactive session at EuroSTAR in Edinburgh was great: I had a full room of people generating code to pass tests.
• I made a tool to set up around 120 environments for the workshop. My approach is reusable, built on open-source tools, and here's a page that will shortly share methods and scripts. I'm delighted that it worked.
• I wrote about what those environments cost to deliver – in terms of money for LLMs and servers, and also in terms of emissions and water use.
• I ran last week's Workroom PlayTime from a table in the centre of the conference – worked well for conference-goers, less-well online.
• I wrote about what it cost to run the workshop in terms of money, power, water and emissions for the LLM use and environments.
• I also wrote about my experiences with different large language models for the workshop.
• I'm now actively trying to find June (possibly July) dates for 1) a session on Exploratory Interfaces 2) a re-run of the EuroSTAR session 3) a small group on those environments. Ping me if you want to put your name in for any of those.

And, from a week or two ago, some housekeeping...

• I've hardly been publishing here, but I'm certainly writing. So I want to put the following topics in front of you: Developing a testing aesthetic for systems that are trained to satisfy us – things LLMs are good at for testers – planning for clarity, not control – lessons (and tools) from factchecking – testing work that needs ephemeral tools – exploratory interfaces – ideas need marshalling, not generating – power laws and other distributions. While I seem only to write productively when I feel the urge, if you urge me to polish one of these I'm more likely to publish it!
• The program for Agile Testing Days is out. I'm delighted to reveal that I'll be doing several things; a scriptless high-wire Testing Transparently keynote with Elizabeth Zagroba, a Crafting Custom Tools tutorial with Bart Knaack and Huib Schoots, and a followup session.
• I'm actively seeking new clients for my teaching and consulting practice – you could drop a meeting into my diary if you'd like to explore some possibilities!

Cheers –

James

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