Thursday, January 4, 2018

The Testing Show: CodeNewbie With Saron Yitbarek, Part 1

Happy New Year everyone!

I'd like to present the newly retooled The Testing Show. New theme music (courtesy of my band Ensign Red) and what I hope will be a new streamlined format for the show. I've learned a thing or two about doing audio the past few years and I'm hoping to see us transition a little bit to a broader storytelling approach along with the regular interviews that we do.

To that end, that special guest I was talking about a few weeks back is Saron Yitbarek, the mastermind behind the CodeNewbie website, podcast, Twitter chats and recently the producer of the BaseCS podcast as well as running the Codeland development conference.

I joke during the intro in this show that I feel like a bit of a fanboy here, but seriously, I have wanted to interview Saron for a long time. I was a little nervous asking if she'd be on our show with her level of visibility, so I was overjoyed when she said "yes" and even more so at the natural conversation that we had. She's not just a great interviewee, she's an excellent interviewer as well, so there was a really fun give and take on this show. To that end, I likewise decided that my traditional heavy grammatical editing style wasn't suited for this conversation. Some of the audio may sound a little less slick by TESTHEAD standards, but I feel it adds to the immediacy and excitement of the conversation. I'm not kidding when I say I was a bit giddy at a few spots in this episode.

All right, fanboy gushing aside, this episode covers what I think is interesting ground. Saron is perhaps one of the few guests who has never identified as a software tester, but she totally gets testing. What's more, she totally gets the frustration of getting up the courage to commit to learning how to write code (and yes, it takes courage to do it). It takes courage to be continuously frustrated. She also shares a lot of her ups and downs and frustrations that she has had during her own journey, and how she uses that as fuel to help support others on their coding journeys.

We recorded for almost two hours, and it has been a struggle to decide what to keep the focus on for these interviews. I'm hoping I've captured the best of the conversation, but I'll leave that to you all to decide.

If you enjoy listening to The Testing Show, I'd like to ask you a favor. Please go to Apple Podcasts and give us a rating. If you feel we deserve five stars, please give it to us :). If you feel we deserve less, that's fine too, but please leave a review and tell us why you feel that way. Give us a review as to why you think we deserve five stars while you are at it :). We aim to make The Testing Show the best podcast we can and if you have thoughts about how we can make it better, as the producer, I'm definitely interested.



The Testing Show: CodeNewbie With Saron Yitbarek, Part 1: The Testing shows talks about the process of learning how to code, so we talk with Saron Yitbarek about where and how to start. Tune in to learn more!

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