Workroom PlayTime

Regular, short, online interactive sessions for subscribers and friends.

Come to Workroom PlayTime to play with testing for 20 minutes.We'll test and talk: No lecture, no sales pitch.

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.

Subscribers get an hour a month of testing-related playtime. Paying subscribers get priority seats, and access to the longer sessions where we re-run exercises and go deeper. Subscribe.

2026 – Themed sets

Here's more about my plans – expect plan and reality to diverge...

Interesting Testing I

• 044 15 January: A Software Library with no Code
• 045 22 January: The ARC prize
• 046 29 January: The Ralph Loop

I'll re-run all these over a longer session at the end of February – see Longplayer: Interesting Testing. Here's an Interesting Testing theme page as the series grows.

Speaker Prep

• 047 5 February: Getting to a Great Abstract
• 048 12 February:
• 049 19 February:
• 050 26 February:

I'll run these together for a longer Speaker Prep session in mid-March.

2025

• 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)
• 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: Testing Story
• 023 03 July: Comparing LLMs to explore judgement
• 024 17 July: Puzzle 11 (is an awful toy)
• 025 24 July: curl exercises for testers
• 026 14 August: Shared Inspiration
• 027 21 August: Being Random
• 028 28 August: My Story Chart
• 029 4 September: Imagined | Real
• 030 11 September: Completeness (is a wicked problem)
• 031 18 September: Puzzle 17
• 032 2 October: Redirection operators ( | etc.) for testers
• 033 9 October: Exploratory Interfaces II
• 034 16 October: jq for testers
• 035 23 October: build 3 throwaway tools in 15 minutes
• 036 30 October: custom asserts
• 037 6 November: xargs for testers
• 038 13 November: parts for tools
• 039 20 November: Stuck Overflow
• 040 27 November: Explore Generated Code II
• 041 4 December: Puzzle 38
• 042 11 December: Exploratory Interfaces 4: Tests
• 043 18 December: Building Short Exercises