Nice to see you.
Watch this to see someone doing awesome stuff.
When watching it many people think or say they are going to give up Coke/Pepsi. It would be nice if it was true. It would also be nice if people could think about other corporations dominating our lives and how they will probably only go away if WE DECIDE AND CHOOSE to stop consuming their not so superior products.
Love his work. Have the book
The past few months have been very interesting on The Software Testing Club front. There’s a great community behind it and this is what makes it so much fun to run. All jobs should be this much fun. Am super proud at what the community has created.
I blame Rob for where it has headed now. At least partly 
It is very very very hard to find someone to work with on any venture. Apart from finding someone at the right time, there is always a compatibility thing that needs to be considered from many angles. I say this from experience too. Rob has really shown the passion and creativity to help us both push each other to the next level. To constantly improve and create at every possible opportunity. I believe it is a good sign that we both communicate and nag each other on a constant basis. Now 1 year on (I think?!) we are both eager to push it even more PLUS we have the confidence and trust that we can both commit to what we will do.
The past year has seen us focus on a few thing:
This was previously called Flash Mob Testing. Currently a service where we pull together testers for an online testing project for a fee. We are charging £30 per hour and pay our testers on an hourly basis. We have had a few small scale projects which have had positive feedback. And financially it seems to work for us and the testers. Currently we are looking into striking a balance of us managing projects and us putting testers and companies in contact directly. We believe we have a good solution for this, which will be announced fairly soon. The Software Testing Job Board we launched recently is also compatible to our desire to connect testers to companies.
This has been fun! Though a lot of hard work! The first issue was a magazine. Then we turned it into a newspaper because we could get them printed with The Newspaper Club and because we thought it was cool We have a designer who was our intern, but is now freelancing with us. He has done a fab job keeping the fun and funkyness of our brand. And we thought that it would only make sense to put all the content on to a website to make it even more accessible, so we created The Testing Planet website. All the content has come from contributions from our community, of course.
As the popularity of our community and content grows we are increasingly getting lovely feedback and becoming the seriously fun place to go for community and conversations within the software testing industry. The Software Testing Club is always growing community, members and traffic wise. We have been working with a few companies to help them make the connections they need to. So far this has been product, event and recruitment related.
There is still a way to go for STC to become a sustainable enterprise, but we do believe we are getting there.
We’re going on a long holiday soon. Not quite sure how long it will last at this stage…however it does mean that we are ‘unschooling‘ our two wonderful boys – currently aged 5 & 6.
Aaron (our 6 year old) is starting to read and write. Ben still has a way to go, he can write his own name on his own and is happy to write other words with help.
We were really keen to log our experiences of our travel and are very conscious that it is a family experience, so it only makes sense that everyone participates! Of course, with kids we have to think about their capabilities.
Our Jolly Wicked website is named after a term our boys used to describe things as very cool. We think our trip will be jolly wicked too. And all the more wicked with our boys logging their view of the world.
We opted to use Tumblr because it is very user friendly and astonishingly easy for the kids to post content through an iPhone, this is because:
It is experimental. It is educational. And in years to come it will be a great resource to look back on. We’ve all had a go at posting something and it has been successful so far.
In the future, when my boys turn 18, they can tell their future employer/university/clients that they have been blogging for 12/13 years
We made a decision a while back that we fancied doing something different. As things have evolved over the past couple of years we realised that we were no longer location dependent.
This means I have relinquished all Werkshop responsibilities – so I am no longer involved in with The Werks or Lewes Werks. My work has increasingly become location independent, something I’ve been consciously working towards, meaning that I can do my work from anywhere with my computer and wifi. Transpires it is the same situation for my husband.
And my boys schooling wasn’t enough of a reason for us to stay.
So, we’ve decided to go travelling. We debated many locations, but eventually decided we fancied going to America. I’ve got family there who we will be visiting (sister, niece, nephews, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc). But it’s not just about visiting family. We plan to have a big ole road trip hopefully lasting several months.
Being Rosie, the plan was to also visit as many coworking spaces as possible and hopefully meet some really nice likeminded people along the way.
We were going to start in New York, however we had the offer from Tara Hunt to take her Winnie on our road trip. We couldn’t turn down the offer and I’ve been wanting to meet Tara anyways, so it only seemed logical to take up the jolly wicked offer. This means we will be starting our adventure in Montreal.
We haven’t mapped out our trip in fine detail yet and am guessing we will be making up a lot as we go along. We do know it will start at the end of September and the road trip will need to end in February, but apart from that everything else is open to whatever comes along.
Obviously we’ll be going as a whole family, which our boys are very excited about. From my perspective it means balancing their ‘unschooling’ with some of my work commitments – mostly the Software Testing Club which is taking off nicely.
We’ll be setting up a blog Sherry Styleeee where hopefully all four of us will have things to show and say
Many of us have Pi = 3.14159265… drummed into our heads.
There’s probably numerous other extremely other important things drummed into our heads. I remember Pi and doing maths related around to it. It wasn’t difficult at the time.
My sons were telling us what Pi was. They’re too young to actually make sense of it, but they could tell us it was 3.14…. Which made me think – what does Pi really mean? What’s the point of it? I honestly couldn’t remember.
What does it mean now?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Unless of course I happen to need it for something in life. If this did happen I can picture a teacher sitting on my shoulder saying “see, I told you needed to know that”. Of course, it’s all irrelevant. If I did needed to know how to apply Pi to a situation, well I’d just go look it up. Probably starting at Wikipedia.
At school, if you don’t know the answers you quite simply fail.
In real life, if you don’t know them you figure stuff out and apply them as necessary to real life.
It’s kind of obvious there’s a huge mismatch between school and life, which is disappointing. Sometimes I feel I am the only one who sees it.
And I’m not bigging up a different approach. Through experience with my boys, I find that everyone is different. Traditional school may be ok for many. And that’s fine. But even choosing private, small, child-led or homeschooling isn’t always the answer.
I look at my eldest and despite our efforts, he has been bored and unhappy. He does well academically at school, but could be doing so much more and better. We could say tough, stick with it, that’s life, but our heart tells us something else. When he is happy and engaged he turns into such a different boy. We have found an entrepreneur in him. He loves maths and is mostly motivated when it comes to money and figuring out how he can get some to get to his end goal – usually toys at this stage.
I’m pretty convinced that many kids could learn all they needed to know by doing stuff. Projects. Small businesses. Think of all the skills involved in doing it. Many of them never taught at school.
It’s never a one size fits all, but think it suits my son quite well. The following video goes into further detail.
I think there may be an www.aaronsherry.com coming soon
These types of videos (showing lots of web and social media stats) pop up every few months. Nice to watch occasionally. (Though does get a bit repetitive once you’ve seen a couple).
JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.
JESS3 designed and animated this for the JESS3 lecture at AIGA Baltimore in Feb 2010.
I love what the nec (new economics foundation) produces. Right up my street.
I hate it when the government is always talking about growth, seems like I’m not the only one.
It’s great how the global coworking community pulled together to get the coworking.com domain they always wanted.
