Bring your hobbies to work

Welcome to another episode of the Testing Peers podcast.

In this episode, Veerle, Chris, Russell and Tara explore how hobbies influence the way we learn, collaborate and grow within testing and quality engineering.

Before getting into the main topic, the Peers open with some classic banter, covering unusual fruit sizes, strange dreams and the small details that spark curiosity.

The idea for this episode comes from talks and experiences shared within the community, where hobbies such as gaming, storytelling, crafting and sport have inspired lessons that translate into professional practice.

From Vikings and Dungeons & Dragons to pro wrestling, knitting, baking and gym routines, the group reflects on how skills learned outside of work can shape communication, experimentation and continuous improvement. Bring your hobbies to work

In this episode, the Peers discuss

• How hobbies help develop storytelling and teamwork skills
• Seeing testing opportunities in everyday life
• Different personal paths into testing and quality engineering
• Learning through experimentation, failure and iteration
• The role of data, metrics and context in decision making
• Growth mindsets inspired by fitness, crafting and gaming
• Bringing personality and individuality into technical spaces

Key reflections

This episode highlights how hobbies create spaces to experiment, adapt and learn without pressure. Whether journaling gym progress, inventing house rules in games or developing creative skills, these experiences mirror the iterative nature of testing itself.

The Peers also explore how progress is not always visible in the moment. As skills evolve, expectations rise, which can make growth harder to recognise even when it is happening. Bring your hobbies to work

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Transcript

 Hello listeners and welcome to another episode of the Testing Peers. Tonight we've got a special guest who's joining us for the very first time, which we're excited to have with us 'cause we've been trying for a long, long, what? 140 odd episodes. Welcome Vila. Say hello to the the fans. Hello to the fans.

We have our usual guest, Chris. Usual. Hello. Exciting as always. And another special co-host, Tara. Hello. Hello. Today's exciting episode is going to be talking about bringing your hobbies to work, but in true testing peers fashion. Before we get into our exciting topic, we need to do a little bit of banter, so over to tell us what we're gonna talk about today.

Okay. It's, it's so bad. I'm already taking the, taking the episode completely off the tracks, but so, you know, I've been like listening to testing pairs of episodes and the one thing I noticed was like, wow, the intro always sounds like you're gonna do like a mindfulness journey because it's got like the piano and it's got like whoever is hosting, doing the whole sort of soft spoken like, welcome to testing Pears and Rasul.

It's honestly delightful hearing it live. It's just lovely.

I'm sorry that my voice is not gonna be like that at all, because we're going in for the bands and I have got a doozy for you today. Right? So last night I had a really weird dream. I was nothing weird, nothing weird in that way. I was eating blueberries and they were in a wee box, that blueberries coming, and one of them was the size of a satsuma.

And it's weird because you know, they're like kind of dark blue on the outside and then they're like grape colored on the inside and it ruined the experience for me. I've been thinking about it all day. So I was wondering if you had to say what fruit would be ruined by changing size and in what way would it be ruined the most for you?

Probably good that you said fruit, because otherwise I was gonna be getting really upset about like the size of a tiny cheche or something that was gonna really frustrate me. Ah, right. Food in general. No, no, no. I would de I would specifically say fruits. Yeah. I was on holiday last year and. We were at a place where you can go and get your buffet breakfast.

You can just go and pick fruit and, and another bits and bobs, which is quite, quite fun to go off to. I tried to collect all the different flavors of yogurt every day to sort of pick those bits up. Um, and they had bananas that were minuscule and it irritated the life outta me. 'cause take, take the pin of the banana.

The skin was quite hard. When it was such a tiny little thing, but also like it was, it wasn't quite big enough for two mouthfuls, but it was too big for one mouthful. And, you know, I was, it was wrong. I think they were probably pretty average sized, crisp, but ves. So all of those award-winning fruits and veggies that are just ridiculously large sized, the, the watermelon that weighs 50 pounds, the pumpkin, that's, you know.

As big as a house. I find those, so just like a waste of space and energy because like there's no way they taste good. Right? What are you gonna do with that? Like it's, they're just so disturbing to me. I don't know why that's probably true, because if you get like a huge ette, it's always really tasteless.

I just think, wow, a lot of energy went into that for no reason. Unless you're really into like. Pumpkin. Smashing or something. Pumpkin. They look cool though. Depends on the fruit of veg. I, I suppose,

see, because I was going towards, I really would wish that like oranges were smaller. I think that's called a Mandarin. Well, no. No. Or you've got a kumquat. No, no. You see, you've, you've got the wrong scale Again, still, because I'm talking like it was grape size, kumquat. I don't know what a kumquat is. You need the scale of kumquat and it's really fun to say.

If you say it's really fast quite quickly, it doesn't work. It might not work in the edit, that's for sure. Okay, then I need to Google and find these kumquats. I think it seems, because that's what I would love. Just like berry, orange, little berries versus orange, big fruits that are annoying. Right. Let's, um, move away from bands then into hobbies.

So bringing your hobbies to work. Um, who wants to kick us off? Talking a bit about the hobbies and how you can bring it into work, for example. Well, I am the one to blame for the topic idea, but it was inspired listener by not only myself, I am inspirational, but also by Vela and Tara, who have both done amazing talks at the conferences with hobbies, things that they do and learnings that they've brought onto the state to speak to testers and practitioners alike.

I've seen on stage fielder talking on the testing peer stage, no less about Vikings and teamwork and how what we can learn in agile teams. I've seen Tara talking about Dungeons and Dragons and the things that we can learn in testing. I spoke listener about progressing because I am secretly. A small child who gets excited by the big, loud, and exciting.

It's not secret, Chris. That is a well known fact in the testing community. You're not small. I also thought you were gonna say you were secretly a pro wrestler and I was gonna get really excited. Do you know I was a gymnast as a child and so I do appreciate the athleticism, but actually the part I appreciate most in pro wrestling whilst we're on the topic who brought that up, is the, the storytelling, the art of.

Different people, different shapes and sizes. They're there and they're trying to tell the story to entertain people. They're aware of their audience and they will factor in the work that they're doing depending on where they go. There's a great Scottish wrestling promotion that is predominantly. Loud Scottish men drinking in a pub whilst a bunch of, um, loud Scottish wrestlers come and wrestle.

And yet the most famous wrestler after that has often been a chap that comes out to Madonna's, like a prayer, and they all sing along for banter. It's people going for a good time and enjoying putting on a show. And part of the, the wrestling stuff, if I'm trying to weave it back into the testing space, is this whole idea of storytelling and suspension of disbelief, which is.

Forget a lot of stuff that's going on. Sometimes there's a specific story I'm trying to, trying to say, I've got to remove a bunch of noise and let's face it, in this AI era there's a lot more noise. Cutting through that and to be able to tell a story, framing it well, having the ability to tell something within the constraints of X period of time whilst keeping the other person that you're doing your storytelling with.

Safe so that you both win together. Teamwork, we love it. All those things to put on a good show and leave the punters feeling better about them, their lives and their days. That is a fantastic outcome that people don't think of when wrestling is on the cards, but there is a way you can do that. Well, widow stunned.

You see testing and everything we do, don't you Chris? I I was inspired though, Rick Tracy did a, a soapbox talk at Eurostar Copenhagen. And he said, he talked about testing the city. He said, I could be stood at a pedestrian crossing and I've got a button to press. What can I do? There's testing scenarios I can come up with like, how would a blind person test this?

How would these sorts of things come? Stuff in my life can be applied? I can apply testing into that, but also I can learn things from that like, 'cause there's a lot of actual complexity and thought that goes into that process. What can I learn from the logic that goes into building that and traffic lights and the signals and all those things?

How can I apply that into testing? Is there a metaphor I can lead so I can transport people into something to explain perhaps the complex or abstract theory into something that they can relate to. You can say traffic lights in that scenario, different times of day, different traffic flow. The goal is all these sorts of things.

How does that work? And he just said that's just from standing at a level, crossing a level, crossing a pedestrian crossing, waiting for those buttons. He said, you know, there's a lot we can glean from these things. I do think a lot of my experiences have been two way streets. Um, I pull the storytelling and the teamwork capabilities from Dungeons and Dragons into my DevOps workspace all the time.

But I think there are other things that I, I count on as hobbies. Like I love to bake and I knit and crochet, and those things have taught me the patience and the attention to detail that I can apply to testing. But testing has also given me this more iterative approach to, to be a little bit more willing to take risks and to, to fudge those details a little bit to see what happens.

I'm with you on that one. Actually, testing has helped me immensely take the pressure off myself as a user, because what testing has taught me is if I do this thing wrong on a website or if I'm placing an order or if I'm doing whatever, filling out any form, if it doesn. Work the way I did it, that is still something they let me, the user do.

And it's actually so much less stressful because in the past I would be like, I had, I'd have like six tabs open to maybe like sort of test different scenarios. Like what if I click that one, what page will it take me to? And at this point I'm just like, actually that's not my problem as your problem. You built it, you're letting me use it.

And I'm the same way in games actually as well because I recently got, got into gaming and in the past I used to always think like, oh, games are horrible because you have to do the right thing and uh, you know, what if you lose? And these days I'm just like, well, what if you lose? What if you die? It doesn't matter.

I'm gonna test if I can do this thing. It's honestly, testing has taken the pressure of many things in my life and it's been quite nice. I love that. That's, that's awesome. I'm glad I'm not the only one. We just have so many hobbies, it's hard to decide which one to talk about. Well, hobby, hobbies are things that you spend your time on that that capture your attention though.

Right. So it's not just like, sometimes it's not a passion. It's something you, it's a thing that you do. Like I, I've heard a lot of people, a friend Shay did a whole talk on lessons learned as a parent that can be applied into testing. Mm-hmm. I don't think any. I don't think anyone with small kids thinks that parenting is a hobby, but that's a full-time job for sure.

But I'm also one of those and the most stressful, whatever. Talking about your children at work can be a hobby though sometimes. That's true. That's fair enough. I'll say I'm one of those people though that hasn't met a hobby that I haven't wanted to try once, so like. I, I sew, I cross-stitch. I do basically anything that's a fiber art.

I paint. I did ballroom dance for a while, like you name it, I've tried it and I've probably probably learned some life lesson out of it that hopefully if I'm, if I'm being smart and truly wise, I've applied to other aspects of my life. I guess it's a bit unavoidable as well. Like it's kind of just the way that life happens, right?

You pick up something in one area, you tend to apply it to other bits. Like it's not always instantly obvious how to do that. But I guess like especially with things you've been doing for a longer time, eventually those skills kind of. See, I makes sense. There's a lot of things that when you do repetitively, you, you learn another skill that's transferable to other assets to do other things, you know, and testing has a lot of sort of problem solving skill sets, um, questioning skill sets and things like that.

So there's a lot of hobbies out there that teach you, um, about, well, the act of learning a hobby. Is the act of kind of going and exploring, trying to find information about to get better at it, which is a lot of parallels to testing. And you get a new bit of software or a new feature and trying to then figure out what does it do, what, well, what does it do badly, how can I improve it?

And all those sort of basic learning sort of loops that you wanna do and a new hobby comes into your way. And hobbies become passions. Not always to Chris's point. Hobbies can just be the activities you do, but often we get absorbed in them. We start focusing on them, we start wanting to be better at them.

And I can honestly say in the sound way that that's true of testing for me, testing is a hobby of mine. You know, doing this podcast, it's a hobby. Doing conferences is a hobby and learning about the subject matter and learning about the whole thing, it's never ending cycle, but. It's something that's become a hobby and I think a lot of people, their work, they wouldn't necessarily see it as a hobby, but I certainly perceive a lot of my work to be kind of a hobby of sorts.

Obviously when I'm getting paid for it, it's no longer a hobby at the job then, but I do a lot of it outside of that. So I guess the question then becomes, would you still test if you didn't get paid for it? Because clearly the podcast and conferences you like, you usually don't get paid for those. My answer is quite simple.

Yes. Um, I was a tester before I was a tester, and I'll be a tester af long after I'm a tester. Um, I like to figure out how things work. Talking earlier, like my hobbies are around things like engineering, construction, building cars, like putting things together. I went down the route of trying to learn how to build a car to figure out how cars were put together.

I wanted to understand how the brake system work, how the, the, the suspension systems work. So how do we do it? Go and build one. So I'm always curious, naturally want to know how things work. So I would've always been a tester and I'll always be trying to figure out how things work, which is kind of the brain I take to testing.

How's it work? How can we work better? You know, that's, that's very similar to, I think my, my testing origin story was my parents used to make fun of me for always wanting to take things apart. And so my parents started buying me kits, like I built my own radio and I built my own phone and things like that because it was like, please don't break the one in the house just to see how it works.

One that we actually need. Absolutely. Yeah. The story for me as a child that when I was about two years old, I took my cot apart from the inside out, destroyed it, so it fell on top of me just 'cause I like I wanted to do it put together. So, yeah. That's so interesting though because I feel like your, both of your reasons for being in testing and for finding testing interesting is just completely different from mine.

What's yours? Yeah. Um, I, I, I'm not particularly bothered about how machines work or what the inner workings of like memorial bike are, as long as it keeps going and as long as it doesn't give me shit. While I'm on it. And so I feel like my reasons for being in software testing are largely the same. Like I don't care how it works, it just needs to absolutely work.

Um, so I guess I'm more of a, I dunno, like, what'd you call that? Like user-centric test or something? Like, just sort of, yeah. That's interesting because I would say it's the same thing, just thinking, thinking about flaws. Is it? Well, let me explain a little bit because the reason I want to take things apart is so I can make them better and put them together in a better way so I can understand it, so that I can improve it so it can be a better system, a better outcome, so that the in effect and the testing side you get, if I know how two parts work, I can give better feedback that helps people.

Make the end product better. So it's transferred for me from just simply knowing how it works to, well, if I know how it works, then I can contribute better to actually improving it. But ultimately the goal in Software Sense is a better software. I feel so malicious now because my reason for it is like, how far can I push this and where are the loopholes that I can break stuff?

IJI get joy from those things. I get joy from finding logic, flaws and process flaws, but it's ultimately always with the goal of improving them, fixing them. Mine, mine wasn't even down that line though. My, my mom told me, she's like, you were always obsessed with like lists. Patterns, logic or like I, I'm, I'm the kid that would go into a ball pit and then sort the colors out together, get all the yellows together, all the reds together, all the boots together.

I had toy cars like little die cast toy cars, and I put them in queues of all different, I'm the one that would get all the smarties out and work out harmony of. Each color of smart I had in a packet. Like I liked patterns, I liked numbers, I liked data. Those, those sorts of things. I became sort of obsessed.

My, I had friends at university that called me Stato, which was named after someone from the telly because I, I enjoyed data and the stories that you can tell with data, what you can learn from data. It was, I don't actually dislike a lot of metrics ironically, but. I like data that helps you tell a story, that helps you uncover meaning behind things.

I enjoy storytelling and I find storytelling that's qualified with data. Really interesting, and I, I often felt compelled once I got, got a bit of a, an oversight on things to sort of try and course correct to, to have more order. I didn't achieve those things because normally something happened like my brother, but.

That, that's kind of where I came, came into things like I was really obsessed with like alpha order by alphabet, order by age, order by color. I found all that stuff fascinating. And then as a, as a thing, when I struggle to sleep, sometimes I will recall some of that data to help calm me to go back to sleep and stuff.

So like I'll think, let's name every goalkeeper that played in the Premier League in 1992. I'll just like Bosh bosh bosh bosh bch. And that sort of calm, comforting knowledge will just. Help me drift off to sleep. We need to have a conversation outside of this, Chris, I think, to help you in those areas.

'cause some information I've got that might, uh, might support you in those needs. But I remember stato, um, heavily from my youth and I also understand the value of data. I must admit, I've always been wrapped around data and understanding things and stats and probabilities and trying to understand things like that.

I think it's. I think it's interesting. I mean, it is also how I ended up in computer games, right? Because computer games are a thing that obsessed with data and stats and things that drive you. So like you, your speed running is a, is a real thing in games. Trying to get the best, fastest time, the best, highest points accrued on things.

And I spent seven years working in the games industry. A lot of that, again is data and trying to do better. So again, to your continuous improvement point before Russ, and it does. Sort of coalesce in one way or another. It, it's done that more al altruistically, I think it often is probably the way of doing it.

But yeah, it is more because I want to know, I need to know there is that impulsive thing. But I think we're going away from hobbies more into our personalities now. So. But our, our hobbies, shape our personalities and vice versa. And vice. Yeah. And yeah, and it all, it all trickles in and ties together. I know.

Um, you know, I have a degree in mathematics. That was actually a hobby before I decided to study it. I just found random things fascinating, like the way it ancient Egyptians did multiplication without having like lace value numbers was mind blowing to me. Um. But that said like, I hate statistics. I hate a dashboard because.

I know how made up those could be and how skewed they can be if I just run a different set of tests or if I drop one test out of the lot. Like so they don't tell the story and they don't paint the picture for me as much as going, look, if I click here twice, they can be, it's broken. Gamified the hell out them.

Bad, bad metrics do my nothing but bad stats. Do like, I remember when, um, talking about a particular footballer called Olivier, who you watch him on the pitch. He's the, he's the only striker to have played every game in a World Cup to win the World Cup without having a shot on goal. Did that for the France national team.

Didn't have a single shot and still managed to win the World Cup. Statistically, he was awful, but he played a part in the team. One, you can tell a tell a story with statistics that may make something look awful. But he was crucial in his team to enable them to get on and win a World Cup. That's, that's, that's the way, like stats can be used really badly.

They can be weaponized in some ways, but it's why I have this Post-it note here that says, but why, because I, I like to challenge, like I'm showing some data. I don't immediately take data verbatim and go, well, then that's the reason. Like someone says, I automated 10 tests today. Should you have done.

That's a harsh Chris. I, I am a, Chris comes to you. Somebody comes to you with an achievement and you just tell them. But why did you do that? Well, is is it an achievement though? Do you know? Do you know what I mean? Like, I, I It's not, it's not. Yeah, that's true. I can be, I can be a kind and empathetic human being at times as well, but, right.

If people wear things as a badge, Javan, they're often doing it like not often doing. There are bad actors in, in our workplace that use data to sort of hide behind things. Um, I've seen threads on Reddit that talk about what can I do? To look more productive so I can get on with doing things that I'm actually interested in.

Using data to basically keep management off their back so they can carry on doing things. This there, there's loads of like hacky things and stuff that exist because people are using data they can point to and go, I am productive. I worked this many hours. I looked busy. That's, it's so funny because if those people were actually like, this is gonna sound so judgmental.

If those people had good managers that took the things that they were passionate about, they wouldn't have to look busy. Right? Because they'd be doing the things that they're excited about. Uh, one of the things I actually love to ask in interviews is, what do you do outside of work? Like not a, not a computer.

When I was working with developers, so often their hobby is developing and I'm like, okay, but what else do you get? And there's advice, isn't there? People say, take hobbies out of your CV when you're applying for jobs. They're like, oh, employees don't want to hear that. I'm like, whenever I've been a hiring manager, I want to know that you have a life outside of your job.

I want to know that you are passionate about other things. I, you know, I, I think it, it, it's, I think it's healthy. Not to have 100% devotional things. It's, it's not just about having a life. To me, it's about, I, I can almost guess a personality based on what they say, right? If somebody tells me that they're, you know, they've got a fantasy football league that they've been in for 15 years, I'm like, oh, this person really likes stats and numbers.

Because that's what that's about, right? If somebody tells me that they love nothing more than to sit and quilts in the afternoon, I'm like, that is a patient person who loves to plan, right? So you can, you can pluck these little ideas of personality out when somebody tells you their hobby. You know what?

I always find it really difficult when people ask me what my hobbies are because I'm always like, well, it kind of depends. Depends on the season, depends on the day, depends on how I woke up that morning. Like obviously there's, there's always like a recurring things, but then some of the things that I do a lot in summer, in winter, I'll be like, I can't really say that that as my hobby because I've not done that in about half a year, whereas like currently, because it is.

Well, it's February. I was gonna say it's January. But either way, like this whole time of the year, I, I just don't really wanna do too much. So I just sit in the house. I watch shows on Netflix. I knit a lot. I listen to podcasts and I go nap, nap, and that's kind of it. But like, I'm not gonna tell people that those are my hobbies because it's sounds sad, whereas in like half a year.

I'll be doing completely different things. I'll be outside, I'll be on the motorbike, I'll be sailing, I'll be doing whatever, and then I'll be like, well, am I really a knitter? I can't really say that I'm a knitter because I've not knitted anything in like four months. So it's like, it's, it's, it shouldn't be a difficult question, but as soon as somebody goes like, what are your hobbies?

I'm like, yes. What are our hobbies? Quite a, quite a violent way to be asked the question as well. What are. Well, that's what I like to tell people. Yes. Hobbies are my hobbies. I haven't found one that I absolutely hated yet. I found ones that I'm not good at and I don't do often. I have found ones that I will do repeatedly.

I have found ones that I spent a lot of money on and never touched again. Mm-hmm. But I love hobbies in general. That's the thing though, isn't it? I think we also have to be slightly careful about pre-judging on hobbies because as much as you know, they can suggest certain things, it's discovering more that helps you find out whether that, um, idea is true or not, isn't it?

'cause you know, you could say that someone who likes to go walking, for example, likes isolation and, um, likes fresh air and likes to kind of be free and wild. But actually they could only go walks on the structured walks with 10 friends every time. It the context. There's a disclaimer for not judging, isn't it?

Which is actually a note to. In this instance, it's a note to hiring managers and interview is like finding out things about people without, like, with withholding judgment and, and um, yeah, like understanding that sort of stuff. It's interesting. That's where your sticky note comes in. I love to go walking, but why?

Well, exactly that and that, that's the context. You know, you could say football, but actually you are, um, you hate working in a team, uh, and things like that. And this, it's amazing how often on cvs, the hobbies that people list are quite. Generic type things. Sim simplified. Like I've got hobbies that I haven't done in 10 years on mine still, which is just a bit silly 'cause I couldn't be bothered to update it.

But it was a hobby. I mean it to be a hobby. I just haven't got around to doing it recently. And that recently has got longer and longer. Adulthood sucks. Yeah, there's not enough time is there. But napping is a great one that Fiona put down. Man, I should add that to my cv. That's a healthy practice. No. The worst thing is that now that we're talking about it, I'm like, actually, I don't nap enough to say it's truly a hobby.

That can always be remedied. You know, I, you know, I said like, testing takes the pressure off things for me, but then I put it back on, I. Okay, but, so now that we're talking about, uh, putting pressure on yourself and, uh, adulthood is hard and learning from your hobbies, I've got a nice one to make 'cause I feel a little bit better.

I think. So, a little over a year ago I started going to the gym. Because I was like, I need to start creating a bit of muscle mass. I'm not getting any younger. You know what they say about women. It's like really healthy four year pan to have a bit of muscle. So it was like, right. Cool. I'm gonna start lifting and.

I did, and the one thing that I noticed was that kind of every week you go back and every week you work your absolute ARS off, and every week you go home tired. And I'm like, why doesn't it get easier? Like, why am I tired every week? And it's all right because you put on more weight every week. Like, at some point you get stronger and so you up the weight and so you still get tired, but you're lifting more.

And I kept, uh, like a sort of journal first. I used an app and then I started like actually using a journal. And so you put in how much weight you lifted and how many repetitions and like how exhausted, how relatively exhausted you were. And then you have this whole sort of record that shows you actually, you got a lot stronger over time.

And so it feels equally difficult. But it's because you're doing something that is objectively harder. And then at some point that just suddenly hit me because I was like, oh, I feel like I've been a really rubbish tester for about seven to eight years, and I don't feel like I got any better at it. And then at some point I realized, what if I just kept raising the bar and I started doing things that were more difficult?

Keep changing the target. Yeah. Or keep changing what Yeah. Good is, so to speak. And my mind was blown a little bit. I really like that. I think a lot of times I don't feel like I've moved very much in, in my skills and my career, but then I will look back on some automation that I wrote, you know, 10 years ago on.

Oh yeah. No, I, I've changed. We're actually good. 'cause this was horrible and I don't know what I was thinking. It that leads very well into kind of recording what you're doing, what your strengths are, what you're good at. Um, those sorts of informations like bringing hobbies, journaling, and all the rest of, it's a fantastic way of seeing progress.

Um, I remember, I don't think any of us would say that when we started out in testing, we knew half of what we know now, but. Now we do. So we should feel we've grown, have we grown as fast as others have? We, there's all sorts of different complexities. As technology changes, we have to grow with the technology changes.

So we're constantly learning. So you never feel done, which therefore means you never feel like the expert because I. There's always someone who knows more than you. There's always another book to read. There's always another peer to blow your mind. Uh, and all those sorts of things keeps going. So you end up in a constant journey of learning, which means you never feel like, you know, we haven't gotten the Olympics, we're not gonna get a gold medal.

We don't have a pinnacle. Our pinnacle is a constant moving point of technology ideas. Skills knowledge, same as many, many hobbies. 'cause you, you're always trying to get better at it, but you never. You're never happy because you're never, if it's a hobby, you're not, you're not going to be the top of the top.

You're just enjoying it usually. I think something to add to that is that I think you end up knowing different things later on in your career. So I was recently thinking about like, oh, the stuff that I learned when I sort of had to like. S like study to be a tester and you had to go through like all of these, like this ice TKB stuff and all that, you had to learn about all of these testing techniques.

And so I was thinking about that recently. I was like, I don't, I don't think I remember half of what I learned at the time. But then I kinda realized when I went through some of it, I was like, oh, actually I do still know all of this. I just don't think about it anymore. So like you kind of just apply it more or less intuitively, but at some point it kind of starts feeling like, oh, I must be a fraud because I'm doing this thing and I don't know what it's called or why I know it.

And it's, and it, it kind of just makes you feel like you're, you're not very good at what you do. And at the same time, it's actually like, no, no, no. If you were a beginner, you would be really invested in like knowing what technique this is. But at this point you've done it so often. Like you don't really, like when you're in the car, you've been driving for a long time.

You don't really look at what gear you're in because you kind of feel it intuitively. So you don't really have to keep the count as much. It comes second nature. Yeah, lots of it is like picking up a board game, isn't it? Like sometimes that that first time you look at the the game you're like, it's just this.

I mean, we played Jumanji the other week. That game made no sense when I read the instructions, but the minute we started playing and we're like, ah, it makes perfect sense. But is that actually a game now? It's an actual board game. Yeah. We didn't get, we didn't have, we didn't have rhinos smashed through the walls.

But, you know, that sort of thing is, is true. And actually, you know, it's actually, there's a lot of instinct involved in these things. And learned, learned behaviors and routines and things, much as engaging your brain to get stuff done helps you be better like a muscle to your, your gym analogy. And, and I think.

If I dare bring AI into the conversation, the biggest threat that we have in our lives as technical testy type people is disengaging that part of our brain, that muscle, that thing, that curiosity and handing it over to the LLM gods. But there is the opportunity, therefore, to actually go, you do this crap over here whilst I do that and, and B.

You know, work smarter, not harder, still working, still being me, still being curious, like I got better at the guitar. I'm not great at the guitar, but it sounds okay because I learned how to play chords that I could play without having to look at my left hand when I was playing. And then it flowed better.

And, and I understood the song that I was doing and I did those sorts of things. I couldn't do everything like a Robert Plant or other people like that because frankly, I'm not that human and I can't do that sort of thing. But I was able to do something that was satisfactory to me and, and learn and enjoy and embrace those things.

And, and the same is, same was true. When I was a, a budding gymnast, there were particular things that I could not do. So I wasn't going to enter those in a competition, but I got better and I got, I was able to transition towards doing certain things that they wouldn't have been able to do week one, because you learn, you set goals, you achieve things, and you have a particular goal for where you want to head in life, the things you want to achieve.

Um, but. My, my words of 2026 are really decisive humility, and the way that we, we operate in the workplace is very much around the lines. I don't know this, but I want to know, or I can find out where it is, but it, it, it's owning that stuff because I'm deeply angered every time I use a, a chat bot or, or a promptly friend that acts like everything is perfect and wonderful and I complete everything, and I'm like.

Just directly tell me if you don't know something, we are gonna achieve so much more if you don't make stuff up or leave me to the point where I presume everything's fine. And this is true when we are, when we're working as a team and everything, right. Is that what you call them? Prompt friends? I'm gonna say new, new term unlocked that well because there's, there's lots of promptness going on and, and prompt friends is just what I've decided to call them today.

Nice. It's now part of my vernacular. I was going to ask you a question. Um, and I think it applies to both like gym things and baking and all of those things. Eventually, there's a point, I think with any skill that you get where you kind of become. So familiar with it that you kind of start to make stuff up.

Right, right. As you were talking about board games, I was thinking about this game that my family and I play every holiday. It's a card game. It's a version of, um, like Romy basically. But our family has played it so long for generations that we kind of have like our house rules. Oh, I love that. And so introducing people to this game is a nightmare because we have to explain it to them every time.

But do you think that you do that in your day-to-day work where you're like, I'm just gonna try this and if it works, we'll make it part of the routine And if it doesn't, we'll pretend like it didn't exist. Yeah, absolutely. Um, and then sometimes something stick because people really like it and some other things.

You try your absolute darnedest to get your team to adopt it like I did for a while with example mapping and people were just not having it. Yeah. And then sometimes you introduce a silly little thing like, Hey, why don't we have like a five minute coffee call before the daily so that we can sort of like chat amongst ourselves.

And people are like, yeah, that's amazing. And it's adopted in a heartbeat and yeah. And I was like, people are never gonna enjoy that because my team is not that social. And turns out actually they are. And that has a lot of parallels to hobbies and especially sports. 'cause there's techniques, there's ideas, there's things that you experiment.

Some things will work with that person. Some things won't work with that person. Um, you know, like be it golf, be it tennis, be it gym. Your body is unique. So the way in which you can do something, there's the best technique. But Roger Federer uses, for example, but. Not every single tennis player plays exactly the same strokes.

They have quirk, they adapt them, they mold them to the thing. And with all these hobbies that we take towards our workplace, a lot of what we do is we learn, we adapt. We're asking our peers, our friends, the community, the internet, you name it, chat, JPT, or other things for ideas. And then we are trying to.