EuroSTAR Conference

Europe's Best Software Testing Conference

Track Talk W1

The Lost Art of Taking Good Notes

Nicole van der Hoeven

11:00-11:45 CEST Wednesday 14th June

The quickest way to learn, improve, and thrive as a tester or developer isn’t to learn more and more programming languages or testing frameworks.

It’s to take notes– and take them well.

Most of us grow up taking notes in school, but we stop doing it when we need to learn the most: when we get a job. The reason is that we never graduated from taking disparate notes to creating a personal knowledge management system.

Jotting things down is the FIRST step to taking good notes. We can take things further by linking notes in a web of knowledge that resembles our own brains, interrogating new knowledge to understand how it does or does not fit into what we already know, and using our systems to learn and improve at a pace we just can’t do without notes.

In this talk, Nicole van der Hoeven discusses what a personal knowledge management system is, why it’s essential for any career in the tech industry, and the surprising effect of collaborating on notes across teams. She also shows a sneak peak of a tester’s vault of knowledge that she’s developed that helps her keep up with the fast-paced development of modern tech trends, as well as concrete examples of how she’s used it to become a better tester.

What you will learn

  1. Taking good notes is essential in an industry like tech where things are constantly changing.
  2. Creating a personal knowledge management system can help shoulder some of the cognitive load of learning.
  3. Sharing your notes leads to clarity and transparency within project teams.

Session Details

  • Introductory
  • 45 Minutes
  • Includes 15mins Q&A
  • Communication
Buy Conference Ticket

Session Speaker

Nicole van der Hoeven

Developer Advocate (Performance Testing) – Grafana Labs, Netherlands

Nicole is a performance engineer with over a decade of experience in breaking software and learning to build it back up again. She has lived in the Philippines, the US, Australia, the Netherlands, and Portugal, helping teams all over the world scale up their load tests on the cloud. She currently works at k6 as a Developer Advocate for performance testing, which means she learns new stuff for a living and then tells people about how she did it. She plays tabletop roleplaying games five times a week, makes videos on YouTube about taking notes, and studies more languages than she can remember.

BACK TO PROGRAMME

Last Tickets

Don’t miss out on EuroSTAR 2024 – final tickets now available.

Book a group and save even more. Teams save up to 35% with this offer.

Individual

From €895

for 1 day

BOOK TICKET

Groups

From €627

Based on 10 Tickets

Book Group

Stay in the Loop

We want to ensure you never miss important announcements, updates and special offers from EuroSTAR.