Thursday July 18th 2019 is a significant date in the short history of the Testing Peers.

Simon had finally convinced Russell, David and myself to explore the possibility of podcasting together, and this was when the #testingpeerspodcast channel started in our Slack group.

We were more than half a year into our joined-up adventure and our output had so far provided us with a supportive and accountable peer group, but no output that would be visible to many.

There was a hunger to do more, my initial pitch to the others that I had invited to join me included the possibility of a blog or a conference paper, but I hadn’t considered a podcast.

We started the blog site, but not all of us are bloggers.

I grabbed a hold of the @testingpeers Twitter handle.

What could we do to continue our project?

Simon is a relentless force for spreading his word, and he has been blogging for a decade, he has spoken at conferences and appeared on various webinars and podcasts. He saw a niche in the market for the four of us to go and make our own.

Eventually, we relented and started to talk about the idea of what a podcast could look like.

We transitioned our initial Trello board with ideas for blogs, to those that could become podcast themes.

We started having video calls on Zoom; maybe not so strange in these lockdown times, but it was pretty new to me when we started.

What was pretty unique about this experience was that, until these calls started, the other three had never seen or spoken directly with each other outside of the confines of WhatsApp or Slack before.

The conversations were promising and the ideas for what we could achieve, how we would pitch the podcast and what we wanted it to look and sound like started to take shape.

None of us has really done anything like this before, but we had already been using Zoom, so we have used that to record our meetings. We have used Audacity to edit. My wonderfully talented brother-in-law NewPollution for our logo and David’s wife for our music.

This isn’t a slick operation, it really is just four friends who met virtually as testers, having fun with each other. We hope to get better as we go, we’ve already talked about those ELMO and cue cards that I’ve seen on Twitter since lockdown began and we will look to invest in better audio equipment as we go along.

Our inaugural episode is an introduction to the four of us. We have some other material already recorded and we hope that we will get better at doing this, it is new, but I already am finding our regular Thursday night beers with the Testing Peers a real highlight to my week!

Please check out our opening episode, follow us on Twitter, follow this site and look out for more in the future.

Thank you.