Friday, June 24, 2011

PODCAST FRIDAY: Performance Test Conference, Web Security and Landing a Job

Hey everyone! It's Friday (late) and it's time to give a nod to the podcasts that may be of interest to testers some of them not necessarily testing related, but I hope worth your listening attention. So if you are out and about this weekend and want some quality conversation and learning, these may be right up your alley.

First, of course, I'm not going to lead off a podcast roundup without mentioning the one I produce ;). Episode #51 of "This Week in Software Testing" has Abbie Caracostas as our guest. Abbie is the director of training at Redwood Collaborative Media, which is the company that owns STP (and by extension, this podcast :) ). the primary topic of this podcast is the upcoming STP Performance Summit happening July 26-28, which will be delivered entirely online.

Second, Trish Khoo and Bruce McLeod return with the 3rd installment of TestCast, called "Do I Get the Job?" and as you might guess from the title, this is all about interviewing and discussing how to effectively interview for a testing position. A lot of the approach and terminology feels different to me, again, this show originates in Australia, so there's some local vernacular, but the ideas and thoughts are good to be considered by any tester regardless of locale (and don't wait until you are looking for a job to consider these things ;) ).

Over in 5by5 land, Dan Benjamin and Merlin Mann deliver a somewhat disjointed show this week, but even a disjointed "Back to Work" has lots of gold to mine, and "Assistant to the Regional Monkey" definitely delivers some quirky gold. there's a lot of tangents in this episode, and a fair amount of Buddhist philosophy, but some great advice about working your way through your trouble spots and realizing when you are being a hypocrite and dealing with it (blog post this weekend on that topic by your truly coming soon, by the way).

Dan Benjamin and John Gruber deliver a briefer version of The Talk Show this week. In "Hard Stop", John and Dan discuss various new mobile technologies (tablets and phones and how each market is striving to keep the mobile revolution going mainstream. the FBI raid of a data center and the woes of Dropbox also makes its way into the show, as does Stanley Kubrick and a note to projectionists (John Gruber and Stanley Kubrick, who'da thunk? ;) ).

Finally, for those who are not familiar with Scott Hanselmann and his podcast Hanselminutes, I'd recommend putting it on your watch list. a lot of his podcast topics are Microsoft centric, but before you tune out at that (all you hip Rails and old school LAMP folks out there ;) ), many of the ideas and topics do have crossover appeal, and this week, his discussion of "Web Security Basics with Barry Darrans" provides definite crossover appeal. what do we need to know today to be in the game when it comes to Web Security? What threats are out there and actively attacking sites, and what makes them different?

That's it for this week. Looking forward to a new batch of shows next week. Stay tuned and keep listening!

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