As part of my ongoing experiment of going to conferences to increase my visibility and promote my company I attended my first Star West conference this year. So far the experiment isn’t going so well and I lose money on every conference which is apparently not uncommon as the payoff from the speaker circuit takes a couple years to start. Now they tell me…

I had missed the submission deadline for Star West and didn’t want to pay full price for admission so I volunteered to host the Test Automation track for SQE. Insider Secret – Conferences are always looking for people to do this and you will often get comp’ed the admission by doing it. This meant that I didn’t get to choose which sessions to attend and also meant I had to stay in them for the entire duration.

Not being able to leave meant I learned a valuable lesson – don’t judge a session by the first 2 minutes. I tend to give up on sessions too early opting instead to sit in the hallways and socialize with people I only see at conferences.

So here are write-ups on every session from the Star West 2010 Test Automation track. It would have been nice to include slide decks in each from something like slideshare but those cost money to access and certainly are not embeddable.

The thing that most impressed me about my Star experience is the program book they give you. For each session is a page that has the topic blurb at the top and then ruled paper for the rest. This means notes are nice and tidy and in one spot. CAST and other similarly sized conferences should take note of this though I don’t see it scaling to Agile size without massive deforestation.

My experience was however blighted by some of the HP booth staff who I think owe me an apology. And I suspect that as a result I’ll be persona non grata at SQE events for awhile. Which is fine with me for the moment as I don’t think I’ll be doing the conference thing for at least 2011.