Selenium Conference 2018 was announced, I was excited to be a speaker in it. I had tasted the blood of conferences that year, as I had recently attended the Selenium summit by ATA[Agile Testing Alliance] in Pune. It is a different world, especially for folks like me, who only have themselves to call as an organization, because i am a one person company. 

Excitedly i put in my proposal, there were a lot of encouraging words written in the conference submission template, first time speakers, women speakers, if you belong to a group which is less represented diversity wise etc etc. I was full of hopes. I chose a topic, created a proposal and went ahead with my submission. Almost confident i would be going to Bangalore that summer 2018.
 

A few days later, actually a lot many days later i got an email stating, that my workshop proposal got declined. I was extremely hurt. I requested to be enlightened me with the reasons. I thought i could convince them somehow to allow me to come. For a person like me, attending a Selenium Conference happening in India if only i could become a speaker not only i would have got free flight tickets i would have received free pass to conference and this was all that i wanted in the world. People like me are always with negative bank balance, don’t judge, please. 

So, Naresh Jain i had no idea about him until that day, and until today really no idea how big shot guy he is, replied me back and very calmly and in detail explained me the reason. i still have the email, i see it time and again, whenever i start getting overconfident this is what i do, like today -

 I couldn’t understand the content of the email at that time. But I understood that knowing behave, cucumber, specflow doesn’t give me any authority to talk about BDD the process. So I started looking for courses on cucumber, workshops, projects, even work for free for anyone just to learn. Finally I joined cucumber school BDD course and gained insights into this world - https://cucumber.io/school/

So, when I read the mail by Naresh again it made sense. And I understand today why it was rejected. And I am thankful for the rejection. The words technical debt I understood after I attended a talk in Delhi by Pradeep. 

2020, my learning journey hasn’t halted. I have figured through rejections that knowing tools is half of the story if you don’t understand why these tools are there in the first place, what problems they are going to solve. If you cannot visualize the process, if you haven’t experienced that process, the problems, that culture, the people you cannot really provide/teach/talk about the “solution”. At the end all you would have is a lot of code, technical debt and nobody knowing where to find that needle which got buried in this hay stack. 
 

So I am going back to basics, like Pradeep keeps saying. I have some time now, thanks to my injury life has taught me to slow down and look within rather than look out. I emailed Michael. In our email exchanges he asked me to decide what I want to learn, and while I was reading his and James pages I came across this 

book. Now I think God is funny, Bret PettiChord, created the first test automation tool I learnt ‘watir’ web application testing in ruby. I have so far only read few pages of this book, it is a costly one, but I don’t feel like finishing it. This book is ‘priceless’ you don’t read this one, you savour it. Trust me when I say this. 

Well, having said that my 2020 selenium conference proposal this year, is as well rejected. This time although it didn’t hurt that much, well because I gained a lot, a hell lot of experience, all thanks to people at the Selenium Conference 2020, and the process is an on-going one. This experience is for some other time although to share.