2024 in review

Another year flies by, so I’m again taking the opportunity to review the year that was 2024.

Vital statistics

I only published 7 blog posts this year (including this one), again not meeting my personal target cadence of a post every month. I haven’t been finding much in the way of inspiration to post, but 2024 has still set a record for total views which I find quite amazing after 10 years of blogging! The traffic is slightly skewed by the fact that my most popular posts – viz. my critiques of the World Quality Report – appeared twice during 2024, one a belated review of the 2023 report and the other for 2024’s effort.

I’m still on Twitter/X and closed out the year with just over 1,200 followers, slightly down from last year. I’m no longer posting on X and it appears most of the interesting testers I used to follow have already left the platform. I’m seeing almost all of my engagement coming from my posts on LinkedIn now.

Work life

I spent the year working part-time for SSW in my role as Test Practice Lead and all of it for the same government agency I started working with in 2023. I had a great experience in this agency and my tenure there and at SSW have now both just come to an end.

In my own business, Dr Lee Consulting, I again focused on my Mentoring offering and have found one-on-one mentoring very rewarding.

I’m not intending to look for new opportunities at this stage of life, but maybe an interesting project or two could tempt me away from more pleasurable pursuits in the years ahead!

Testing-related events

For the first time in maybe 15 years, I didn’t attend any virtual or in-person testing conferences or meetups during 2024, nor did I give any presentations. It’s perhaps a sign of my deliberate choice to wind down that I opted out of opportunities during the year after a long stint of contributing to the testing community.

Testing books

I wrapped up the content for the free AST e-book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester. This book provides responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective, with its content being crowdsourced from the membership of the AST and the broader testing community. The final version of the book contains 28 responses and continues to be freely available from the AST’s GitHub.

I didn’t publish an updated version of my book An Exploration of Testers during 2024 and the current version is likely to be the last. There were more purchases of the book, though, so I was happy to be able to make another donation to the Association for Software Testing’s excellent Grants program.

Reading

My strong reading habit continued during 2024, thanks to the great service from Geelong Regional Libraries. I again added a little fiction into the mix.

Of the 37 books I read this year, the most impactful were two very different reads. Firstly, Rolf Dobelli’s plea to “Stop Reading The News” was just what I needed to break my addiction to following the news cycle and I went cold turkey early in 2024, never to go back. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything, apart from mainstream media’s propaganda. Secondly, snooker player Ronnie O’Sullivan’s biography “Unbreakable” was an inspiring read. Although I’ve followed his entire career, his many challenges and work on his mindset were interesting to read about – and he remains at the very top of the sport despite his age.

My reading is detailed below:

Non-fiction

• The Myth of Normal (Gabor Mate)
• The Courage to Face COVID-19 (John Leake and Peter A. McCullough)
• Stop Reading The News (Rolf Dobelli)
• The Paradox of Choice (Barry Schwartz)
• Life As We Knew It (Aisha Dow and Melissa Cunningham)
• How Innovation Works (Matt Ridley)
• The Locked-up Country (Shahar Hameiri and Tom Chodor)
• Ageless Soul (Thomas Moore)
• The Upside of Stress (Kelly McGonigal)
• Viral (Alina Chan and Matt Ridley)
• Superforecasting (Dan Gardner and Philip E. Tetlock)
• Same As Ever (Morgan Housel)
• Ultra-Processed People (Chris van Tulleken)
• Cobalt Red (Siddharth Kara)
• Deadly Medicines and Organised Crime (Peter C. Gøtzsche)
• Living Plantfully (Lindsey Harrad)
• Read Write Own (Chris Dixon)
• Oxygen (Patrick McKeown)
• Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself (Joe Dispenza)
• Shoe Dog (Phil Knight)
• Slow Productivity (Cal Newport)
• Lies My Government Told Me (Robert Malone)
• Making A Killing (Bob Torres)
• The Influencer Industry (Emily Hund)
• The Psychology of Money (Morgan Housel)
• The Way of Integrity (Martha Beck)
• Unbreakable (Ronnie O’Sullivan)
• The Violence of the Green Revolution (Vandana Shiva)
• The Bodies of Others (Naomi Wolf)
• Die With Zero (Bill Perkins)
• The New Confessions of an Economic Hitman (John Perkins)
• Unsettled (Steven E. Koonin)
• How Not To Lose $1 million (John Addis)

Fiction

• Changing Places (David Lodge)
• Apples Never Fall (Liane Moriarty)
• The Truth Teller (Angela Elwell Hunt)
• I Know My Love (Catherine Gaskin)

Volunteering for the UK Vegan Society

I continued with my volunteer work for the UK’s Vegan Society by contributing to their web research efforts (and I didn’t tackle any proofreading jobs this year).

I came up with recommendations for changes to the website’s “Key Facts” page after reviewing other sites to define what a modern layout and content should look like for the page.

The process of building a completely new website for the Society continued this year and most of my efforts involved testing it. It was good to be “hands on” and providing value to the organization using my existing skillset.

I didn’t publish any new blogs for the Society in 2024, but started a couple of posts and expect those to be finalized early in 2025. I really enjoy blogging on veganism, both to flex my writing muscles and also to more deeply engage with vegan content.

Working with The Vegan Society continues to be a joy, I’m blessed to work with great people there who really appreciate my efforts. I expect to contribute more fully in 2025 now that my time in the testing game has come to an end.

In closing

I remain grateful for the attention & support from the readers of my blog and also my followers on other platforms. I wish you all a Happy New Year!

As I move on from the testing industry, this blog might not see too many more posts but I may be inspired to write again once in a while…

(Featured image for this post by Igor Kasalovic on Unsplash)