As the year 2022 is coming to an end, I wanted to quickly look back at my year career-wise. This seems to be the trend in the software testing space at the moment on LinkedIn and other social media so now I just do that as well.

After giving a talk at a single conference in 2019 and two each in 2020 and 2021, this aspect of my career has grown exponentially in 2022.

In total, I spoke at 12 different events ranging from webinars and podcast appearances to online and in-person conferences. You can see all of these events here.

One highlight was certainly the Romanian Test Conference in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Here I premiered my talk "Smoke Tests & Mirrors - The Magic in Test Automation", which I will continue to polish and present in 2023. For a detailed travelogue and conference review check out my article about RTC.

Another highlight in terms of content was my talk "Of Plugins & Decorators" for SeleniumConf Online. Here, I gave a deeply technical talk about trivago's test framework plugin infrastructure and internal design decisions. This was quite challenging to prepare but I was happy with how it turned out.

For 2023, I have five different events lined up so far (two of them are not ready to be announced yet) and I am quite excited about this. Also, I am working on a big project that will be ready for release in the first half of the new year. Unfortunately, I cannot say more about this either. If you are interested in what's coming up, just check my events page for 2023.

The year for the world was full of crises and shocks, environmental disasters, wars, diseases and inflation. I was glad to have the support of my family, friends, employer, work colleagues and the whole software testing community. It almost feels unfair that the year regarding on my career was one of the best....

I hope for everyone's sake that next year will be more uneventful so we can all get some peace of mind.

Here's to a happy new year 2023!

Benjamin