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Zoopla Work
It was a busy month this October for me at Zoopla! Started this month by helping my product team with more load testing work to have better confidence that our other APIs can handle the expected traffic. I then did some investigation work on how we can use webhooks for our contract testing with Pact. At the moment, whenever there are changes in our contract, we have had to manually trigger the provider verification job and so having this process automated would save us some time. On a similar note, I also drafted a blog post about contract testing to Zoopla's Product and Technology (P&T) blog which should go live soon.
On the management side of things, I took part in another workshop focused on people management and it was very useful. It's been great opening up to other managers and learning more on how to coach effectively.
As we get closer to releasing version 1 of the new property details page, I've been helping the team to make sure that our data sources are more accurate. To support this, we organised two bug bashes. The first bug bash was to validate the main user journey for address property look up and the second bug bash was opened up to the wider P&T so they can also validate that they can find their home address from our new data source.
I also spent some of my time helping the other co-leads for our Quality and Risk Communities of Practice kick off session which is going to happen this November! Finally, I did some prep work for the Test.Bash() talk (more about this below) and asked for feedback from the Quality Engineering team.
Community Work
This month, I did an Introduction to Cypress talk to Instrument where I gave a quick overview as to what Cypress is and its features and how it can help them with their testing activities. Also, I collaborated again with Bartosz to give the same Accessibility talk to new individuals who registered for his in-person Cypress workshop.
I also did a pre-recorded atomic talk about Contract Testing at TestFlix 2021. It was well received and it was also great to hear other atomic talks from other speakers!
The feedback below from Marissa was really heart warming! 💜
Finally, it was Test.Bash(); 2021! I gave a talk about our automated tooling that we use here in Zoopla. It was so nice to speak again with Gwen and she's such a great host! During the talk, I explained how we are using modern testing tools at Zoopla, the reasoning behind choosing the tools and any challenges that we faced. It was also to give recognition to the Quality Engineering team to the wider community with all the amazing work that they have done for the past years.
It was also great to be recognised by other professionals. Sujith gave a talk on how you can say tool aware and he mentioned me as part of his talk which was really amazing! 💜
Personal Development
💪🏼 I tried Caroline Girvan's Epic program and I lasted for almost two weeks, which to me was great already because this was really difficult. I fell ill for a week though so I had to take a week off to recharge.
📚 I read Attached by Dr. Amir Lavine and Rachel S.F Heller which offered a great insight on different attachment styles such as anxious, avoidant and secure. I also started reading a fiction book called Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng.
🎧 Listened to various podcast episodes consistently.
October Favourites
Watched Frozen the musical with Gabby
Gabby getting certificates and awards from school. Her teachers have provided feedback about her progress and it was amazing to hear about her developments.
Did mini golf again and Gabby threw a tantrum for not winning 😂
Filipino dinner at parent's house. My mum cooked so many dishes but my favourite was the pork adobo. It was so good!
Spoon and Rice opening at Boxpark.
Took Gabby trick or treating 💜
Tried osso buco for the first time and it was delicious.