Call for Speakers - Closing October 13th

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.