QA Meetup with Michael Bolton, Ljubljana, Slovenia

Estimated reading time is two-three minutes.

I’m taking a photo of Karlo, who’s taking a photo of Michael. To make it even more fun, you can see Michael, Karlo and me on the big screen.

Introduction

At the beginning of the month, a member of the Testival community posted in our Slack that Michael Bolton is giving a talk in nearby Ljubljana, Slovenia.

This was not the first time I would see Michael speak. He was already in Zagreb (Croatia, where I live) at Testival #41.

Ljubljana is about a two hour drive from Zagreb, so a few of us decided to go. I was driving one car. There was at least one more car from Zagreb with a few more people. A fun part of such events is that there’s several hours of driving to get there and back, so there’s plenty of time to just talk. Frequently, it’s hard to find some time to just talk with people.

We arrived an hour or two earlier. We had time to walk around a bit, grab a drink and some food. There was even time for a short chess game.

Meetup

QA meetup in Ljubljana happens only once a year. (Our Testival meetup is monthly.) About fifty (or even sixty) people came. Pretty good outcome for a meetup.

It started with a very short introduction by the organizers. So short, that I don’t think the organizer introduced himself or the company, just the speaker.

They had trouble connecting the speaker’s machine to the big screen. I think the solution included connecting a phone with a cable to the computer, then connecting to the screen via the phone, then somehow to the computer. Or, something even more complicated. Welcome to 2025.

The official talk name was “What Are We Thinking in the Age of AI?”. The unofficial summary could be “I don’t hate AI.”

Michael recommended a lot of books and articles. I was trying to write them all down, or take photos of slides. I’m not sure if I did a good job. I think the best way is to send him an email message asking for slides. I’m sure I missed a lot of recommendations, or got them wrong.

The talk lasted for more than an hour. It was longer than expected. I’m not complaining. It was a good talk.

I have plenty of notes from the talk, but I’m having trouble picking a few to highlight here. A pretty interesting part of the talk was a report Michael (or James Bach, or both of them, I’m not sure) created after testing several AI tools. (I’m not sure if Serious Data From Testing LLMs is the correct report.)

After the talk there was some time for questions. The vast majority of questions came from people that came with me to Ljubljana. I had a few questions too, but I wanted to give others a chance to ask their questions.

After the talk, there was more time to socialize. Since I came all that way to see Michael speak, I decided to stick around him. People were asking all sorts of questions. That was a pretty good part of the event.

Conclusion

I’m glad I heard about the event and that I was able to attend. If it wasn’t posted to Testival Slack, I would surely miss it.

I’m glad several people from the Testival community are interested in testing so much that it’s not a problem for them to drive for a few hours just to attend an event.

It was great to have some time with fellow Testival organizers, Karlo and Tomislav.

The event itself was well organized. The talk was interesting. The discussion after the talk was great.

I hope there will be more events like that in the near future, close enough to where I live.

Read More

If you want to read more about the event, Karlo also wrote a blog post.

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