Evil in Your Living Room

Several years ago I looked evil in the face - but I did not know so at the time.

I was just starting to dip my toes into the swirling waters known as Testing. I'd found a great site that had lots of informative posts to learn from, Testing Reflections, and the guy running the site, Antony Marcano, gave a friendly welcome to a newbie.
A few months later on there was a testing conference in London and Mr Marcano was one of the speakers so I persuaded my boss to send me and off I went.

After listening to his talk I plucked up my courage and introduced myself to him and he invited me along to the usual apres conference drinks and networking at the local pub. More courage plucking and I went along, Antony introduced me to a friend of his who talked enthusiastically at rapid speed andI nodded my head and tried to keep up with what he was saying.

I learned afterwards that I had had my first brush with evil - for the guy in the pub was Alan Richardson aka The Evil Tester

Since then I've had a couple more encounters with evil, most notably at last years Test Bash with his Evil Testers Guide To Eeevil

I also used his Selenium Simplified book to get an intro to Selenium ( and to ensure his evil reputation he uses Java and I ended up installing Eclipse ), this was one of the things that rekindled my interest in code and being more technical.

And the 't' word ( technical ) brings things full circle.

This week I signed up and started going through his free course on Udemy - Technical Web Testing 101.  Several years since I first met him he's still talking enthusiastically and getting you to think about your approach to testing and how it could be improved. Just listening to the videos got me fired up, revealed some holes in my knowledge and approach - and wanting to watch the rest of the videos so I could start learning.

It's not often that an evil person is held up as a role model - but the Evil Tester is one of the exceptions.