“Sharing knowledge is helping to improve the world”. Anastasiia Naiboikina – an engineer with a mission
Sii recently celebrated exceeding the number of 4 000 employees. “Power People” approach their work with real passion and are an inspiration for their surroundings. One of them is Anastasiia Naiboikina, Senior Test Development Engineer at Sii, a frequent speaker at meet-ups and conferences for testers, who puts a lot of emphasis on knowledge sharing in her professional development.
Anastasiia Naiboikina, Senior Test Development Engineer at Sii, is known among the testers’ community of Poznan because she often shares her knowledge at meet-ups and conferences, such as Agile & Automation Days, Geek Girls Carrots Poznań and at PTAQ (Poznań Testing and Quality Group) meetings. Anastasiia proves that both sides benefit from knowledge sharing, reveals how she prepares for speeches and what is her driving force.
Let’s start with what are your daily tasks at Sii?
I work as a Senior Test Development Engineer at Sii and I am a part of the intelligent homes project. Working as a Test Development Engineer is a very interesting path because, in addition to performing analysis of your project’s quality, you can do some coding as well. I love both, coding and ‘breaking’ software, so this is a perfect path for me.
We have an influence on project decisions, including proposing useful improvements. I like creating new valuable things to improve the world, such as pieces of software, frameworks, simulators, communication layers, investigation results, but they all bring value to the project and to the team. I admit I am a perfectionist! To me, it is very important to create maximum convenience and comfort for people around me and myself. If there is a manual step, I try automating it to optimize the team effort. Sometimes, such tasks can be challenging and time-consuming, but in the end we benefit from them. Plus, I always gain lots of new experience while implementing them.
It sounds like a win-win situation. Where this desire of sharing knowledge is coming from?
As I previously said, I like working on self-development and improving and the world around me. Sharing knowledge is helping to improve the world because both sides benefit from it and grow.
From my point of view the main idea behind courses, trainings and mentoring is developing a person’s curiosity and showing them that there are infinite possibilities, you just need to dig deep enough. By sharing knowledge, I want to encourage others to do great things and to make them confident in themselves. I want everyone to believe that sky is not the limit!
Do you have your own mentors or do you prefer to broaden your knowledge at on your own by attending meetups and conferences?
I have always had mentors around me – I believe in solving problems together. I was lucky to have met several great people at the very beginning of my career. They taught me that the best decision is the one that you have verified in a few different sources. Currently I consult a lot with my colleagues and the testers’ community.
Of course, I also participate in different conferences and meet-ups. The one I like the most is TestBash by Ministry of Testing. In addition, I also really enjoy attending meetups dedicated to developers and DevOps to learn more about engineering.
How do you prepare for a presentation?
First, I create a list of topics that I want to talk about to the audience. Then, I usually start improvising by talking to myself on the topic to see how my ideas match in a monologue and make some notes. At the end, if it’s required, I usually create presentation slides. Of course, the most important part of the slides is finding funny pictures Here is a little secret – I am not a big fan of doing presentation slides. I find them breaking the flow of my story-telling. I’d rather do a live coding session or a practical meeting than sharing slides.
What was your last presentation about?
My last presentation’s topic was “Automating the Automation”. Despite the topic might point on test automation, it was about continuous integration. I talked about automatically generating Jenkins jobs and about the ways to apply them to your project. By tradition, we did a little bit of live coding and practicing.
We encourage you to read Anastasiia’s article on testing published on <bloger_sii />, where she shares her experience in optimization: “Reaching object-oriented environmental elegance”. If you are interested in future events with our experts organized by Sii, join our open group on Facebook to get the news first.