Workroom Playtime

Regular, short, interactive sessions for paying subscribers.

We‘ll typically run on Thursdays, in Zoom / Miro, in the afternoons. I’ll keep the group sizes small so that we can talk. We will keep sessions short – 20 minutes — though the post-workshop chat may last longer. I’ll run sessions several times if I need to, depending on busy-ness and timezones.

We’ll work on new and old stuff. You'll see exercises around testing decisions, command-line tools for testers, and around exploration and discovery with a bit of a lean into LLMs. I'm pausing stuff from the Questions workshop and from Speaker Prep for a while. We'll adjust as we go, depending on what works well, and what you're interested in.

I‘ll continue to offer free sessions to non-paying subscribers and everyone else. Paying subscribers get at least an hour a month of testing-related playtime. Subscribe.

Sessions

• 000 3 January: Claude made a BlackBox Puzzle. Off we go!
• 001 10 January: A short diff exercise from the archives.
• 002 17 January: Exploratory Interfaces I
• 003 24 January: SpeakerPrep 1 – What to Follow Up After a Talk.
• 004 31 January: Exploring BlackBox Puzzle 031!
• 005 7 February: Working with grep
• 006 14 February: Exploratory Interfaces II – exploring fixed input
• 007 21 February: SpeakerPrep II – Sloganise
• 008 28 February: Imagining Questions
• 009 7 March: Notation and models (for Puzzle 15)
• 14 / 21 March – two weeks off...
• 010 27 March: Testing Decisions – Power of Variety
• 011 3 April: Using sort
• 012 17 April: Testing Decisions – Cost of Trouble
• 013 24 April: Three Things
• 014 1 May: Puzzle 33
• 015 8 May: Bring me a Letter
• 016 15 May: More playful: Whatever Next?
• 017 22 May: Whatever Next? II
• 018 29 May: RasterReveal
• 020 5 June: Live at EuroSTAR / Code is Cheap
• 019 12 June: Let's explore Puzzle 36
• 021 19 June: Exercises in cat, head and tail
• 022 26 June: Exploratory Interfaces II
• 023 03 July: Linking commands with |, > and < .
• 024 10 July: Testing Story
• 025 17 July: Puzzle 11 (is an awful toy)
• 026 24 July: curl exercises for testers

In June / July: A longer session on custom exploratory interfaces, and a re-run of parts of my EuroSTAR workshop (Test-driven Generation, a hands-on experience)