So it’s now official – I’m going to CAST2013.  Earlier this week I finalized my travel arrangements to and from CAST which is being held in Madison, Wisconsin this year. I had booked my hotel about a month and a half ago and registered for the conference itself early this year shortly after the registration had opened – before any type of schedule or sessions had been posted. This will be my first time attending CAST.  Prior personal commitments prevented me from attending CAST2012 in San Jose, California last year.  I’m not sure what to expect in certain regards at the conference but I do have a better idea now thanks to a blog post Erik Davis wrote about some of the things to expect for first-timers attending CAST.

I do expect to learn – a lot! That’s one of the main reasons I am going – to learn, to challenge myself, to listen to other software testers and learn from their experiences and to get ideas and modify those ideas if need be to apply them to my own testing projects with their own context,  to learn and get better from the tutorial I’ve enrolled for, from the speakers, the talks and the keynotes.  I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of the other testers with whom I’ve had some great discussions with via twitter, direct messages, and emails.  Looking forward to meeting some smart & skilled testers who have taken their own personal time to help me out with feedback and advice on how to deal with and approach different test related scenarios (from speaking about testing to management to approaching testing under different circumstances). Looking forward to meeting some of the testers I’ve worked with this year for the Test Competition.  I am also looking forward to meeting, learning from, and exchanges ideas with testers whom I’ve never had a chance to interact with yet.

Needless to say I am looking forward to the conference and what it offers, and expect to have a few blog posts covering different topics once I return.