My Journey to Becoming a DevOps Tester... By Playing Board Games - Hannah Beech

In this talk, I will describe my journey to becoming more involved with DevOps by building and releasing APIs to track playing board games.

As a tester, I found myself wondering if I'd ever have enough technical knowledge to keep up with the developers in my team. I was also having difficultly keeping track and statistics on what board games I'd been playing. One day, I realised the perfect solution to both these problems - build an API that talked to a Google Sheet, and ran various analysis on the data, using AWS SAM.

But what then? I needed somewhere to host this data. So I set up a pipeline using Jenkins and Docker to release the output of this data to my website. Throughout this process, and many, many failures with my set-up of AWS, Docker and Jenkins, I learnt so much and become so more confident in my knowledge. Finally my goal of holding my own with talking to developers was well on the way to being complete.

As well as the technical knowledge I am constantly gaining with this, an important lesson I've learnt is how much easier it can be to learn new things when you incorporate a hobby into your learning.

With this talk, I'd like to share this journey with the TestBash Manchester audience, and hopefully inspire other testers in their journey of DevOps.