Five fun facts about the origins of This Week in Testing
1. It started as an internal thought experiment: "I wonder how easy it would be to spin up a voice-only room where we could chat with each other at a similar time each week? How can we make it really low-barrier to join?" At that point, there wasn't even a thought about it becoming a podcast.
2. We tried a tool called Jam Shelf for a couple of the early episodes. We wanted to easily embed it on The Club and run it off that platform. In the end, we ran it within a separate browser session with a few people. It didn't work that well.
3. TWiT was then hosted on Twitter via the Twitter Spaces feature! This was before Twitter became a cesspit. And even before it was called This Week in Testing.
4. We moved to LinkedIn audio-only events cos it was super simple for people to join. LinkedIn rapidly shut down the service at the end of 2024 so we moved onto our popular hosting platform, Crowdcast.
5. I was reluctant to record the audio for a podcast as I assumed it would change the vibe. I wanted to reduce any pressure from the weekly chat. Press record = pressure. I'm glad Rosie persevered, encouraging us to turn it into a podcast. Pressure to deliver a good episode is only up slightly from the days when we didn't press record.
Team MoT are so glad This Week in Testing has become what it has become. And no doubt it'll evolve as we continue to expand the MoTaverse. All very exciting! Thanks to everyone who gets involved each week.
