Testing new tech and a big event

Hey folks, back with another solopreneur blog post. Had a fun week – last week – that included a lot of tech testing and some events.

And by fun, I mean that testing new technology – often called Quality Assurance (QA) for those who, like me, don’t know much tech jargon – can get pretty repetitive and boring.

But here’s the fun part.

I had to test some of our new immigration software because we’re almost ready with a new SaaS solution we’ve been working on, which means it will be ready for paying clients shortly.

The problem with QA’ing tech, as I’ve only learned since starting a tech company a few years ago, is that you have to:

  1. test many times to make sure you’re trying out all the different ways you can use it to make sure it’s as intended, and
  2. test everything twice, because the developers actually build everything twice

I had no idea this was the case a few years ago, but what is apparently common practice is to have two versions of your app.

One version, called Staging, is sort of the like the backup, and the real, live version is called Production.

So whenever you want to build something in or add something new, first they build it in Staging, test it, and if it works, then copy it over onto Production, and test it again.

Brilliant.

It also means if there’s a bug – where something breaks or isn’t working with the technology – they can go and try to replicate/fix it in Staging first, without messing anything up on Production and potentially mixing things up for real users.

It makes for more testing/QA’ing, but is also a really interesting and smart approach.

Makes me wonder if there are other ways to apply this strategy in business too; should we have a staging social media account to test new types of content?

Maybe not as practical, but worth mulling over for a bit.

In other news, I also spent the last 2 days at a pretty awesome event in Toronto called Elevate Festival.

Long story short, it’s mostly tech-focused where they’ve brought in tons of speakers to cover topics related to the tech industry, AI, blockchain, fintech, etc. etc.

If it’s related to tech, they’re talking about it.

The biggest takeaway so far is that it’s very different than I expected.

If you’ll remember, the last big tech event I went to was Collision, a 3-day event in Toronto. I talked more about that experience in a blog post here.

Anyway, that event was more centered around startup companies, with booths set up and lots of walking around, chatting, demo’ing, with some talks and presentations mixed in.

What I learned on Day 1 at Elevate is that it’s not the same case here.

Instead of a big hall full of startups and demos, the event itself is mostly scheduled around a whole bunch of talks and presentations, with minimal booths and schmoozing. Not the end of the world, especially since there have been decent evening networking events, but I definitely didn’t have my expectations set correctly.

So I spent most of Wednesday touring around, checking out a few talks, catching up with friends and other people in the space I know, then focused on a group lunch/dinner and evening events.

Because the real goal of attending events like this is usually to network.

And because of that, I skipped a lot of the second day activities, and instead got a bit of work done during the day and am about to head out for the second night of networking events.

Only time will tell who I’ll meet and the adventures I’ll stumble onto…

Have a great day and keep grinding.

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