264: Finding Your Community with Julie Laursen, Joel Hendershott, Evan Niedojadlo

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Welcome to the Test Talks podcast, the place to go to geek out on software testing. And now your host whose mission is to help you succeed with test automation, Joe Colantonio.

Hey, it's Joe. And welcome to another episode of what's gonna be in a few weeks officially the Test Guild Automation Podcast. So I'm rebranding everything. More on that coming up in a few weeks. But today we're going to be talking all about finding your community at meetups with Julie Larson, Joel Hendershot and Evan Nevajaw. So if you're a new test automation engineer, or test engineer in general, and you really want to put yourself out there, but aren't sure how to contribute or where to go, maybe you're a loan tester in your organization, you're having to seek out support outside your company. Maybe because you're the only one there, no one knows what the heck they're doing. Or maybe you're just trying to build some community yourself from scratch, either within your organization or in your area. If so, this episode is for you. Joel, Julie and Evan will share some lessons learned, tips and pain points based on their experience in creating communities and meetups from scratch. You don't want to miss this episode. Check it out.

Test Talks is sponsored by the fantastic folks at SAUCE Labs, the cloud based automated testing platform that eliminates the need to maintain your own selenium grid and test infrastructure. Try it for free today. Visit testalks.com and click on the sign up now link under the homepage sponsor section.

Hey, Julie, Evan and Joel, welcome to Test Talks. Hello.

Hey, thanks for having us.

All right. I think it's the first time I actually interviewed three people at the same time. So really quick, like a one or two sentence. Let's just go around the room and just tell us a little bit more about each one of you. So let's start with you, Julie.

Hi. So my name's Julie Larson and I am a QA professional at Keller Williams here in Austin, Texas. And I met Joe through a convention we have in Austin called softcon and I was presenting on our meetup which is Austin Automation Professionals.

Cool. I'm Evan at Ajadlo, currently a test manager in engineering at TedL.com, actively working on DevOps these days. So a lot of Kubernetes, Terraform, etc. Also a co organizer of Austin Automation Professionals.

And that's it. And I'm Joel Hendershot. I'm the test architect at ESO Solutions. We're all here in Austin. I've been kind of test and Test automation for 1112 years now. Yeah, I had the opportunity to go to like development and just.

I just have always loved tests and.

I've stuck around here.

Very cool. So you all sound like very busy people. It's not like you have simple jobs. So first question is, what makes you want to even be an organizer at a meetup or what got you all involved into it?

So I joined a little bit late to the game because I was in a timeframe where QA was moving from manual to automated in Austin, and it was getting to be very, very difficult to find a job if you weren't already in software development.

So this was my way. Joining as an organizer was my way of getting more involved in the community and trying to make more connections, network with more people and learn more about the skill sets that I needed.

For myself. It was a long time, like 2015. I went to a meetup, Soft Labs, I believe, hosted it over at Willshark Media, now known as Retell Me Not. And I was just kind of, you know, totally new to the automation space, you know, mostly in exploratory testing. And, you know, it just kind of blew my mind, you know, and I just utilized, you know, that community, this podcast and a couple additional resources and just figured it was, you know, later in my career, it was a good time to give back to the community and provide, you know, that content in a place for everyone to really to.

Go really for myself. I was. The reason why I kind of got involved is I was working for realtor.com for several years, completely remotely as one of their test leads and was traveling a lot. But I had no connection to the test community here in Austin. And so I was going a little bit stir crazy because it was just me at home with wife and kids and all that, getting cabin fever. And so how I kind of got started in this is we were part of the Selenium meetup here in Austin and somebody posted that they were going to have one, but they didn't have a time frame or anything. And so I was like, well, I was renting a co working space. So I said, hey, I'm going to host it. I don't know anything about any of you, but you can come here at this time and basically hosted it. They showed up and everybody was expecting me to go over or somebody to go over Page Factory and they were looking to me to.

Just run it. And I was like, I'm just hosting. I have no idea about any of that. Stuff about Page Factor because we weren't using it. And so basically I had some material that I had presented to our teams and so I presented that and that's how Evan and I got hooked up. And all those meetups were completely dead. And so we just decided since we had like 30 people head up to like 40 minutes north of Austin, Austin proper, to show up to a Selenium meetup. I mean, it was very clear that there was a need for that community in Austin. And so Evan and I talked more and that's when we kind of came up with this idea and started rolling forward.

Very cool. That's actually one of the things Julie brought up in her session was a lot of times you go to a meetup and it's dead, no one's there, or it was scheduled ahead of time. So do you usually start off with, okay, it's dead, so we're just going to start up a brand new meetup or is it how do you know like who's already part of the meetup? So you can reach out to them, say, okay, we have new organizers and we're going to do it a better way that's more efficient.

Meetup will pretty much do it automatically.

If you take over a meetup, it's all done through email and you'll just agree to take it over through that email and then Meetup will send another email to all the existing members and you can look into, just go on meetup.com and if you click on a group, you can see who is and who isn't a member.

Yeah. And then getting the information out there, because you look around, you see all these dead meetups and I think one of the things that people look for is consistency. So one of the things that Evan and I, and we had another gentleman who was with our current sponsor, Austin Fraser, the recruiting company here. One of the things that we kind of landed on is that we needed one every single month, whether we had something or not. Like, we have to host, we have to be there. And that's one thing that we have done consistently since November 2017 is we have had a meetup every single month. And we try to keep it consistently on the same day. So we do the last Thursday of every month and that has basically helped us build kind of a rapport with our community. So even if we have a company sponsor, like we had Apple Tools in twice, we've had individuals from our community doing presentations, We've even done just like Lean Coffee chats where we all kind of write down the things we want to talk about, talk about, and then just kind of put those out there to the group. And so I think the key there is having a consistent community so that they know that you're going to be there month after month and consistently be the content month after month. So action speaks louder than words, basically.

So you're the organizers. How does it not become like the Joel Meetup or the Julie Meetup or the Admin meetup where people just assume that the organizer not only is going to organize it, but also is going to give a presentation?

Sure, yeah. I mean, we have a Slack group and we see, you know, we maintain communication throughout that Slack group. There's like this admin channel and we just kind of share ideas. You know, oftentimes someone reaches out to us and as opposed to just saying, oh, I'm going to create this meetup page, we all collaborate together on it and we determine like, yeah, this is good for the community or yeah, it's a vendor, but you know, perhaps you should do a talk associated with what.

They'Re trying to sell.

So this is how we've been doing it and it's worked out, I'd say, fairly well, you know, and there's, to be honest, like there's not. There hasn't been an enormous amount of effort. It's essentially, you know, we run this meetup. A lot of people reach out to us or we think of an idea that we want to talk about and we just post it and communicate it within Slack. So it's been really helpful because, you know, we can't meet up within ourselves like all the time. So, you know, Slack's helped out a lot there.

And another thing I brought up in my talk was talking with the different members in your community. It's really important when someone says something interesting that could be a talk. Having that mindset of listening to what they're working on and knowing what would be a good talk and then encouraging them to submit it or even if they don't want to submit it as full talk, saying, hey, that would be a great lightning learning 5 minute speech. Can you just talk to us a little bit?

So Julie, that's a great point. A lot of times you may notice someone has a skill set in the audience and you think would make for a great speaker, but they may think that they don't have any skills or they're afraid to talk. So how do you encourage people to get over this imposter syndrome?

It's important to tell them that they're not alone in what they're feeling. A lot of people think that maybe their ideas are a little overdone or just because they're used to it. They're living in their ecosystem and they talk about the same thing at work every day, but they don't really know what everyone else is going through. So I think it's important to say, hey, Link, you don't have to be alone in feeling this, and you also don't have to be alone in presentation. We can present with you. The three of us can collaborate on putting together the talk. You can be part of a series of talks. There's multiple different ways to present your idea, and it doesn't always have to.

Be just you speaking at length for 60 minutes.

Yeah.

You know, it's funny, Joe, that you bring that up because just before we got started here, we were talking about a gentleman that we know who sent some emails out, was asking for people to contribute to their testing and DevOps site. And I was actually saying I don't think I have anything particularly interesting to talk about, even though I do stuff that's different than what Julie's doing and what's different than what Evan's doing. I think we all have that to a point. We look at what we're doing and we see the great strides that are being made in test, and we almost feel like the small thing I'm doing right now can't help somebody else, but it really can. And even at that point, like, both Evan and Julie were like, oh, well, why don't you try this? Well, why don't you try that?

Right?

And so I think that part of that is getting to know your community. Like, I think we spend a lot of time. We as organizers are the last people to leave our meetups, mainly because we just kind of sit around for an hour, sometimes two afterwards, and just talk with people in our community and get to know them. And so I think that that has helped a lot in building that strong kind of community culture.

And then the piggyback and both of their answers. We have lightning talks as well, where, you know, someone's not comfortable speaking for.

A long period of time.

You know, we just open it up. You know, lightning talks help out a lot where, you know, we want people to not only talk about tasks and automation and DevOps related items, but also culture, you know, what, you know, what particular issues they're going through, you know, whatever they want to talk about, really. Like, we want to open it up to new speakers, particularly.

So I guess the next Issue I could see. I've run online conferences and a lot of times it's hard to juggle whether a track is going to be beginner, intermediate or advance. And a lot of times I think we suffer for curse of knowledge especially I think everyone Here has over 5 years experience. How do you know, like I guess like you said, know your audience, know, know your meetup. How do you know like when you. When to us a topic may seem like, oh, everyone knows that, but maybe everyone doesn't know that. So how do you know what, at what level to. To the presentation should be presented? I guess the question.

So on occasion we'll have, you know, a survey, right? So sometimes we can utilize a survey with a meetup to identify, you know, kind of and get a feel for really what the audience is, you know, what the audience is.

So for instance, me and Evan were at a different meetup, not our own meetup on Monday and there was a spreadsheet that the organizers sent out to everybody in the community. So already before he even started the discussion, we knew that everybody in the room had a minimum. It was a DevOps meetup. So everyone had a minimum of five years experience in tech. So that kind of gave you a platform to jump off of. And for us, we don't send out as many surveys. We definitely don't send out a spreadsheet before every single meetup. But we have a really tight community and like I said, we have a slack channel. So we generally know where people are. We get a lot of mid level and senior people, especially in Austin, just because of the demographics of Austin. But that doesn't mean that we also don't occasionally have beginner meetups. We just try to tailor it to where people who are at that mid and senior level won't be bored.

So one of the things that we tend to do is I do think we err on the side of going a little bit more shallow with especially the presentation of our content. We had a good meetup on Cypress and we went through it really, really fast and with fairly shallow as far as like kind of the depth, the technicality of it, I guess. However, one thing I always notice is the people who are there who are more technical will always get something out of it because like we will have 30 minute question and answer sessions where people like get really deep and start grilling on it. So it's interesting because the stuff, the slides that we send out and the stuff that people get at the beginning, it's actually pretty good for kind of beginners and lower intermediate folks, because they can actually see it and kind of digest it. And then you have those kind of heavy hitters in the back of the room that at this point, like, they don't throw softball questions at you, right? Like, they're gonna nail you with kind of hard questions and deeper things and make sure not. Not to, like, see if you know your stuff, but, like, they're genuinely interested in that. And so it kind of plays to a little both sides of the field. I do think that we. We as a community need to look at those people who are more senior in our organization and start tailoring some of our content towards that, because I've noticed that a lot of it was on the intermediate and lower side. So, like, I do think that that's important to kind of gauge that and every once in a while have something that has a lot of technical depth and technical meat to it. But I will say that, like, when we do stuff that's super junior, those are our largest meetups. Those are when we have 100 plus people in the room.

And logistically, I just want to say I talk a lot bit about in the speech that I did at saucecon about when and where to do it. If you have a nighttime evening meetup with enough time for networking at the beginning and Q and A at the end, I feel like those have more opportunities to get in depth than having lunchtime meetups. I've been to a lot of lunchtime meetups with another group in Austin, and it just ends up being shallow based on everyone's at lunch and they have.

15 minutes to do it and leave. And that's.

That's another difficult thing with meetups as well, is like, just, you know, creating the meetup so that it abides by, you know, everybody's time. You know, so some people might have families that they have to go to, and then, you know, so doing meetups in the evening has kind of been our thing, but definitely something for us to look into is like, you know, potentially we could do some lunchtime meetup or something like that as well, just to cater to everyone.

Now, we talked about why you all decided to stop organizing meetups and being involved but at a high level. Why do you think community is important? Especially if someone's been working all day, like you said, why should they care about. Now I have to go to this other place to hear a talk on what I did all day.

Oh, I mean, for me, this hits me personally. I was the only toucher at my company for quite a Long time. And you know, when I had gone to that Sauce Labs meetup in 2015, it was like so mind blowing that, you know, I just wanted to learn this stuff. And for me it was a matter of, you know, learning, but I guess it's like self learning, but it's really not because I had a community that I could fall back on and, you know, a podcast and, you know, just sac overflow, etc. I mean, there's. There's just a lot of options for me specifically to learn, you know. And I think, like, for a lot of people who are other companies and they're like the soul tester, like sole sde, you know, whatever they might be, media provides a space for them to go not only talk about what they're working on, but to also identify, you know, what stacks other companies are working with. I think that was really helpful for me and I would hope helpful for other people who are in the same situation.

I also think it's because we're super cool.

So one of the things with that is in tests a lot of times, especially if you are kind of siloed on a team.

Whenever I first started in qa, we had large test teams and those test teams were separate from the dev teams. And so we could kind of collaborate and we could. Misery loves company, as they say, right. So when things are going sideways, we have those people to fall back on. A lot of times what I found is as we move towards these kind of vertical teams, we have embedded testers on the teams and at our organization right now, we don't even have the same reporting structure. All of our testers report to different people. And so you can start to feel kind of fractured from your community. And a lot of times it feels like the devs and the managers and people just don't get you in the test side of it. And so I do think that there is a lot to kind of handle mentally in the test side because you're consistently to find bugs to show kind of quote unquote issues and try and get those fixed. And, you know, sometimes you want people to go together with and you know, if you're struggling with something, you don't necessarily have anyone with expertise in your organization. We have people that just come and talk shop if you want somebody just kind of to commiserate with, you know, a little bit and they know kind of what's going on. Because we've all kind of been in the trenches, like when we're especially learning automation, when we're dealing with selenium and objects that don't exist and we can't find them and all kinds of stuff like that, and flaky tests, the whole bit. There are so many of us that have fought that fight, and an individual, especially kind of a lower intermediate tester, has not dealt with those yet. And so I think it will help with that kind of imposter syndrome to see that there are other people out there that have kind of been in the trenches and done those things. So I do think that we provide that kind of space for them to kind of find the people who are kind of in a similar place to them.

I had my long answer at saucecon, but also just this week, going back to that one meetup we had as an example that me and Evan went to on Monday. There was just one little nugget where the he was the hiring manager, DevOps hiring manager that was leading it, and he pointed at the spreadsheet and he said, we have one QA person here and they're making 90,000 and. And everybody else is making over 100. What is wrong with this picture? You guys in QA are the original automators. You're the people who are doing automation before DevOps. You should be getting paid the same, if not more. So. Hearing that from someone who is in a hiring role high up in this company at the director level is pretty validating to hear. Especially I've worked for some bosses who really clamp down on salary, really clamped down on titles, and would never say anything that encouraging.

So, Julie, also you went over some do's and some don'ts and also some optionals. I thought it'd be kind of fun to get each one's a opinion on all those. So the first one is do's. So if you're running a say someone's listening to this, like, this sounds awesome. I want to do exactly what they're doing. I want to be an organizer. So are there any do's you think all meetups should have?

Yeah, a few of them were. Location is very important. You want to go to where you're.

So if you have a lot of people working in one area of town or that are free at a certain time, even though it might be a little bit inconvenient to you, prioritize a group as a whole over yourself as an organizer and make it easy for them to go to. One of them was find a sponsor. So we have a sponsor named Austin Frazier, that's a recruiting company in town. They provide pizza and beer for our meetup pizza again for our meetups. And having food helps a lot. Number one thing, location for me, number two is food. It also just helps to have a champion. You know, those people as recruiters run into QA people all day and they just throw it in the side. Hey, by the way, there's a meetup going on tonight. And that's how. One of the reasons how we've been.

Able to get our numbers so high.

I think Jolton talked about consistency. So I said have a meet up at least once a month. It doesn't necessarily have to be at the exact same time and place. But for consistency, we do try to have it on Thursday, the third Thursday of every month. But you can throw in extra meetups. Just always try to have a core meetup. So maybe have a social around it, maybe have like a happy hour, maybe. I was doing a book club for a while, I didn't need to bring that back. But throw in things just to keep it on top of mind for people and then have your base like monthly meetup that is at the same time and place.

One thing that I would also add to that is understand the value that this community can bring to each other and to. Especially when you go to look for those sponsors. Like right now, we have to turn sponsors away because they want to get their names in front of people, right? So a lot of times it can be pretty daunting. And well, how do I get space? How do I, you know, make sure there's food for people? How do I make sure that there's drinks or whatever? We have not had an issue with that. So I will say that if you're going to go ahead with this, get a couple folks together and understand your worth and what you bring to the table when you go to one of those sponsors, because that will help tremendously.

My piece is just make everyone feel welcome. You know, it's, it's very. It's a social event. You know, people leave work, they're showing up this meetup and it's just one of those things where, you know, just, just talk to everyone. You know, I've been in meetups where it was just me, myself and I, you know, and like at our meetup, I really make an effort to try and talk to everybody. You know, even if somebody's not in test QA daos, whatever, you know, if they're looking to get into the industry, you know, it's great just to get.

A chance to talk to them and.

Just to kind of show them a potential path forward. So it's just kind of how I've really enjoyed that doing this.

Awesome. Great advice. So that was the positive. How about don'ts? Does anything you think that. Oh man. Why, why, why do people do this in meetups? It really turn off or it really doesn't help get the discussions going or something. Any don'ts?

I mean, for myself, just don't, you know, for drinks. I know this is a crazy thing because not every meetup is sponsored, but just don't always only have beer, like have options. It sounds crazy, but it's like one of those things where, I don't know, just so many people often forget that just have a variety of options available for everybody.

I think one of my biggest things is don't be discouraged. A lot of people quit meetups really early. There's a lot of meetups that are always getting kicked off and then sold pretty quickly when people see that there's only five or ten people. But you got to keep in mind your long term goals. You're never going to get 100 people to every meetup right off the bat.

You have to build to that.

And then the other thing I mentioned in my presentation is not doing it on a single framework or tool. If you call it just a Selenium meetup now Cyprus turns into the new hot thing and no one's going to come to that because it's the Selenium meetup. If you have a QA meetup, then.

It includes both those things. And one thing that I would say that we kind of fell into this at the beginning. But don't just bring external companies in. So we had a couple of folks come in, a couple of companies come and do presentations and we were expecting really technical discussions and it was kind of their marketing sales guy, the general one that you kind of see at a conference or whatever. Can't ask those technical questions. And those were by far our weakest meetups that we've had. We have had when Apple Tools came. I would say that they did a fantastic job. But some of the other ones that we had kind of, I think put us all off on bringing in companies that were kind of using it to market because they weren't really bringing value to the table, to the community as a whole. They were just kind of hawking their product. So I would. It's not necessarily bad if you need a filler space, but just be careful on how many of those you bring in.

That's a great point. So usually are these recorded and then it's streamed or is it just an all on site event for people that are like introverted like I am, which would freak me out.

We are all on site right now, but we intend to record and have more options in the future.

One thing I find interesting is a lot of people don't take advantage of open source projects even contributing to say, documentation even though they're not getting paid. I heard of a lot of people getting opportunities based on that that they never would have had if they never contributed to that open source project. So I'm assuming a meetup's like that. I know. Evan, you're a manager. Like do people sometimes get hired that they wouldn't have got hired if they never went to the meetup or. Julie, were you able to get the, the speaking spot at saucecon because you organized a meetup? Are there any benefits you've seen from that?

I got the saucecon gig because I met my friend Evelyn at a party and she was working at Oracle and she absolutely hated it and she said that someone from Sauce Labs had reached out to her and she wasn't going to talk to them and she never heard of the company and she was just going to continue being miserable at Oracle. So I freaked out on her and said, you have to work for Sauce.

For myself, I mean it's definitely helped my career. You know, I couldn't have gone anywhere without a community. You know, it's like, like I said once again, this idea of like, such as being self taught and all that, I mean realistically it just, for me it meant, you know, having community to bounce ideas off of, to talk to them about, find mentors. I mean it's just one of those things that just helped me a lot. I mean now especially because I'm Mostly working on DevOps SRE type items these days and I'm just repeating the process. Like I'm going to DevOps meetups and you know, discovering all these books and resources just through the community and it's, it's helped me in my current career, in my upcoming career.

You guys have the Austin Fraser stat though on how many people got hired.

Through them, I don't know. I know that they made a tremendous amount of money last year. One thing that I will say for us is that's my primary recruiting pool. Like when we are looking for testers and new folks for our organization, which we have had several in the past few years, past year and a half or so, I will actually use that as kind of my primary place to go look for people who are really Hungry, because that's what, you know, as a person who's higher up in an organization and kind of leading teams and stuff, I want people who are hungry, I want people who are putting out the effort. You know those people. We had a part of our team for a long time. We couldn't even get to show up to the meetup. And it was in our space. Like they'd walk through the group like leaving. Right. So it's interesting, right, because those are not necessarily the people who are going to move the needle for your organization. It's the person who's going to make the time to go to those meetups and try and learn and kind of have those discussions. So I'm going to use that as kind of my primary bed of recruiting. Also, one of the things that we did is because we brought in Austin Fraser, we had their QA person was spending a lot of time with us. And in our meetup, what that did for them is it actually got them kind of the ability to really understand QA and what we do. And so when that person would interview candidates for us, I had so much more trust in that individual because they know the space, they know what we need and kind of what we do. And so I actually added a lot of credibility to both the candidate and the recruiter. And so for hiring, as far as my side of the organization, it has been a tremendous boon for us.

Yeah.

I just want to mention, like Austin Fraser, how interesting that is because I hadn't seen any other recruiting organization that actually embedded their recruiters in the local community within meetups. Something that I think all recruiters should consider. I mean, they have recruiters involved in the DevOps community here. Go lang JavaScript. So there's. It's really interesting to see that and I think it's hugely beneficial for them.

Also, they're not paying for us. Right. For this right now or anything like. Yeah, we just have so much respect for that organization because of how well they've taken care of us. So just. I know we're talking about that a lot, but we, I mean, I don't.

Know, we just have.

But they made their money back.

They hired a lot of people this meetup.

Yeah, so people definitely got hired.

So Julie, before we go, best way.

To contact you, for me personally, it'll be Julie Lorsen. And that's L A U R S e n@kw.com awesome.

How about you, Evan?

Twitter. Definitely. Enedajadlo. So that's E N I E D O J A D L o I'm not incredibly active on Twitter, but I'm going to start writing on random thoughts IO specifically about OPS and you Joel.

So you can email me Joel Tendershot, H e n D E R S H o t.

Or just look me up. Joel Houston hendershot on LinkedIn I'm pretty I don't post a lot there, but I'm always active and talking with people there.

Thank you Julie, Joel and Evan for your meetup. Automation Awesomeness For Links to value we covered in this episode, Head on over to testtalks.com264 and while you're there, make sure to click on that. Sign up for a free trial link under the exclusive Sponsor section to learn all about Sauce Lab's awesome products and services. And as I mentioned, stay tuned for a big announcement and a new logo reveal for the rebranding efforts I'm doing to make things easier and simplified here currently at test talks and joecolantonio.com so that's it for this episode of Test Talks. I'm Joe and my mission is to help you succeed with creating Automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

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