Sunday, March 10, 2013

Happy Birthday! TESTHEAD Turns Three :)!!!

I realized when I woke up this morning that today was the 10th of March. On this day in 2010, I made a commitment to do something and put my own voice to my discoveries of software testing and perhaps a few peripheral things as well. Three years later, I'd say that I have raised a rather opinionated and somewhat hyperactive three year old, but I really appreciate what he has brought to my life.

Three years ago,  I realized I wanted to be more than a practitioner that was doing little more than going through the motions. I wanted to see if I was making sense. I wanted to see if the approaches I was using were any good, and if there were better ideas out there. I wanted a place to publicly state what I thought and believed, and maybe, just maybe, put out there for others to see that I was willing and able to put my own ego and vanity on the line to do something more, something I hoped would, dare I say, rise to greatness.

We often say that we can control our actions, but what is also true is that we cannot as easily control the results or the consequences of our actions. Like dropping a pebble in a pond, I have no way of knowing where those ripples in the water will ultimately go. I just know they will go somewhere, bounce off something, and go a different direction until they run out of energy. This blog was a big pebble drop, and over the course of three years it has brought me in contact with the Miagi-do School of Software Testing, the Association for Software Testing, the Black Box Software Testing courses, Software Test Professionals and the TWiST Podcast, Weekend Testing, The Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, the San Francisco and San Jose Selenium Meetup groups, Sidereel, Rovi Corporation, the San Francisco Ruby Meetup Group, the San Francisco Ruby on Rails Meetup Group, Th Conference for the Association for Software Testing (CAST), Selenium Conference, STAR EAST,  STP-CON, and Socialtext, not to mention in contact with thousands of software testers all over the world, many of which I've had the pleasure to meet in person, and many others I hope to get the chance to meet at some point in the future.

As of today, more than 230,000 unique hits have been recorded on this site. So far in 2013, 500 unique hits a day has been the average. I know of 81 people who directly subscribe to my blog, and I'm guessing quite a few more just stumble across it from time to time. I have seen that there are many software testers from around the world that include TESTHEAD in their blog rolls and help direct interested people here. To all of you, I want to say thank you. It's been a great ride, and I plan to keep on going as long as I have energy to do it and as long as you all have energy to read it :).

5 comments:

Phil Kirkham said...

Happy Birthday ! Great example of what blogging can do for a person. Ever wonder how things would have been different without doing it ?

Pete Walen said...

Congrats! Happy Birthday! :)

thistestingman said...

Keep up the great work Michael. Love the Practicum series in particular, but I read it all.

Chris Kenst said...

Congrats.

Srinivas Kadiyala said...

Congrats,
Happy Birthday :)

I started reading your posts from February.
Love to read more.