Simon Tomes
Community Lead at MoTaverse
he/him
I am Open to Write, Teach, Speak, Mentor, CV Reviews, Podcasting, Meet at MoTaCon 2026, Review Conference Proposals
Hello, I'm Simon. Since 2003 I've had various roles in testing, tech leadership and coaching. I believe in the power of collaboration, creativity and community. π MoT-STEC qualified.
Achievements
Certificates
Awarded for:
Passing the exam with a score of 100%
Activity
earned:
What is time blindness?
earned:
I was absolutely right! But no one listened - Ep 133
earned:
It was a nice experiment to organise London Chapter gathering differently
earned:
I was absolutely right! But no one listened - Ep 133
earned:
This is what a human tech community looks like when ...
Interests
advocacy
all-things-community
asking-questions
bug
bugs
bugs-in-the-wild
charters
coaching
coaching-testers
community
conferences
conference-speaking
continuous-learning
design
diversity
drumming
events
experimentation
exploratory-testing
heuristics
leadership
memes
mentoring
mot-stec
music
oracles
podcasting
process-improvement
product-development
product-management
public-speaking
quality-strategy
space-duck
space-seagull
systems-thinking
team-enablement
testbash
testbash-brighton
testing
writing
Contributions
A lively chat about influence without authority, from asking better questions and telling clearer risk stories to navigating stakeholders, careers, and community visibility.
This month we did something differently. Instead of hosting London chapter at host company, we gathered in a pub. As you see from the photo, there were not many people, but this is a case of qualit...
What are personas? How does using personas in testing help? How do I get started with personas? All these questions answered and more.
One of the big things about ADHD is time blindness.
Heleen Van Grootven explains how time blindness impacts her approach to working. This is a snippet from her excellent Call for Insights: Finding ...
... a new member joins, steps up on the This Week in Quality (TWiQ) stage and says hi.Welcome, Ibekwe. Thanks for introducing yourself. πΒ Lovely to also see all the welcome messages coming in ...
A pessimist, optimist and realist are talking about writing. After agreeing they could write about things that worry us it was time to explore more ideas of things to write about.Optimist: Getting ...
Itβs easy to get lost in everything AI. And tonight at the London Chapter casual catchup was no exception.Β We talked about AI a lot. Like most of every conversation came back to AI. But Iβm gl...
How do we set up AI agents that are secure, reliable and trustworthy? Start with some principles.
If you didn't write it, do you own it? The role of AI Guardrails in code quality.