In this edition of BrowserStack Champion Spotlight, we meet John Pourdanis, a 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐒𝐨𝐟𝐭𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐄𝐧𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝐓𝐞𝐬𝐭 with over 10 years of experience from Greece
About John
John is a Lead Quality Assurance Engineer at VMware on Tanzu Service Mesh Project. Tanzu Service Mesh provides advanced, end-to-end connectivity, security, and insights for modern applications—across application end-users, microservices, APIs, and data—enabling compliance with Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and data protection and privacy regulations. He has been involved in different types of testing on this challenging and large-scale project.
Public Speaking Experience
John's Public speaking journey started long ago when he was a student. Microsoft Student Partners, a university student program, is where he gave his first-ever talk, and he described the experience as stressful, and his heart was about to give up. Since then, John has been speaking at many conferences and organizing meetups and conferences himself. Here is John's advice to overcome the fear of public speaking.
- Step up and give your first talk, no matter how bad you think it will be.
- Practice, practice, and practice! There is no other way to overcome your fears!
- Keep Participating in conferences and Meetups and give talks. You get used to it, and you become better and better.
Organizing meetups
After attending several Meetups in town on several technologies, John had an idea to start a Software Testing Meetup five years ago. He wanted the Meetup to be technology agnostic and a platform to share, contribute and collaborate with others. John found like-minded people to join forces to create a strong meetup with several events and about 1000 registered people. He was surprised that the Greek testing community had that much to share.
Exciting things Forward
In the QA world, John expects people to share challenges and difficulties they meet in their careers instead of simple tutorials on new technology. For example, there are limited resources for testing a project built on microservices architecture, but there are tons of tutorials for API testing with different tools. As the technology evolves and the testing part should evolve too. In a nutshell, John wants to see more niche technical content from the testing community.
Experience as a Browserstack Champion
John believes the BrowserStack champions community is a well-organized, tech-oriented community with leaders worldwide. I like very much how supportive those people are, and the events that BrowserStack Champions organize have high Quality, not Quantity! I am very happy to be part of this.
Experience using BrowserStack Products.
John was an avid Browserstack user. When asked about his experience using BrowserStack, he shared his positive experience using App Live. He added that App Live makes QA folk's life easier because having your farm with so many devices to test at least the basic flow of a Mobile Application before releasing it to market is impossible. So, with App Live, you can do manual checks on different devices with different OS and screens to ensure your app does not look strange or break. If you are good with automation, you may use App Automate to automate some cases that you do manually on App Live to make your life easier.
