Category: News

Help Linnea

“There is a saying that it takes a whole village to raise a child. Now we need a whole village to save our Linnea”

Linnea, Kristoffer Nordströms daughter, is five and a half years and comes from Karlskrona in Sweden. Her world revolved up until recently around My Little Ponies, riding her bicycle and popcorn… lots of popcorn. She who has one best friend: her beloved big brother Kristian.
That was her world – until a few months ago when she suddenly and shockingly became afflicted, and got emergency surgery for a brain tumor.
After the operation, we hoped that the bad news would end. But now the family lives in the hospital and has been told that the tumor is an aggressive variety called DIPG (Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma). The short story is that there is a heart-breakingly minimal chance of survival using established treatments.

There is a possible treatment that we are now aiming for: one that means the tumor is treated through catheters implanted directly into the tumor. Studies and reports show that such a direct treatment gives Linnea the best chance of one day becoming healthy. The cost of treatment and the journeys are very high. Higher than the average person can pay for: £ 65.000 for the first operation and then £ 6.500 for treatments thereafter. In the current situation, it is unclear how many of these Linnea will need.

Please help Kristoffer and his family!

Update July 3 2017

Great news!! The treatment seems to work, Kristoffer writes on his Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/kristoffer.nordstrom.792
We know a lot of people are waiting for this so me and Giedre want to give you the fantastic news.
Linnea had her third Intra Arterial treatment today and all went well without complications, this was the first time that we added the immunotherapy to the treatment, Linneas immune system is now being taught how to recognise and attack the tumor cells itself (Autologous Dendritic Cell Immunotherapy)!
The amazing news of today is that the treatment continues to do its job and we now see further shrinkage in the tumor from the last treatment three weeks ago.
The doctors see a distinct reduction in size since last time!
We now know that this is a treatment that is working for Linnea and for the other children here in Mexico, there are now over 30 families from all over the world here.
The treatment is very effective, but also very expensive, with the combined Immunotherapy and Chemotherapy the cost is 30.000USD (250.000SEK) every third week, later once Linneas immunesystem is trained the treatment will go back to chemotherapy only.
We realise we need to do this for an unforseen time going forward and looking at the costs of each treatment and our budget we need to ask all of you who have helped us get here to help us even further in saving our daughter.
Any donations, big or small, are more than welcome, you can help us at our fundraising site.
Thank you so much everyone who has helped us get here.
Swish donations from Sweden are also very welcome, the number is: +46 723 58 09 53

ISST launch!

The International Society for Software Testing has launched – lets start putting the common sense & humanity back into testing!

ISST_logo_website

 

I was fortunate enough to be asked to be one of the founding members of the ISST. Looking down the list of members, I know most of them personally & can vouch for all of them.

The society is still in its infancy & there are many questions to be answered but one thing is for certain, there are many exciting times ahead & I am really glad to be onboard.

Go & check it out for yourself & let me know what you think:

http://www.commonsensetesting.org/

Happy New Year!

happy new year 2013Happy New Year! 2013 promises to become a great year… Hope it does for you as well! I have some interesting and exciting plans for this year, hope to blog about those later.

I will be speaking at least 5 conferences in 2013 and hope to blog more as I did last year. “My 2012 in blogging” report tells me I had almost 10.000 visits on my blog, so thank you for reading and discussing testing on this blog!

Looking back at 2012 it brought me a lot of good things: being speaker at 10 conferences, co-writing a book, a new job, learned a boat load of new stuff, met many new interesting people, had a great holiday in the USA, simply too much to mention. Let’s make 2013 a truly fantastic year together!

A new job!!

Yesterday I had my last working day at Rabobank Interntional. I am starting as a test consultant at codecentric (www.codecentric.nl). Unfortunately at Rabobank I can’t do what I want, what I aspire and what I am good at. I was looking for a role as “principal test consultant”. I want to work as a consultant, trainer and coach. Improve people, teams and organizations! My strength lies in sharing the passion for testing, improve, create, learn, teach. I feel comfortable in a role as “technical leader”, where I can and may interfere with the strategic and tactical decisions about testing but also do hands-on stuff to help testers get better. And such a job isn’t available (yet) within Rabo.

Codecentric

Codecentric is a small agile consultancy company in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands there are 12 people, they no wait… we have another 150 people in other countries in Europe. Codecentric is expert in developing and improving IT solutions. We believe in a new way of working, trust, equality, focus, passion, pleasure and expertise to ensure a higher result. Codecentric specializes in agile and Scrum, architecture, performance management/monitoring, Java software development and agile testing. I chose codecentric because they are real experts in everything they do. And they see being an expert as a fundamental choice. They place high demands on each member of the team. Codecentric uses the 4 +1 model work: 1 day per week for the gathering and sharing knowlegde and expertise. I simply love this way of continuously investing in people.

Sabbatical?

In November I will be “in between jobs” or in transition. I like to call it a sabbatical, but I will definitely not be idle the whole month. Next week I will be at EuroStar: looking forward seeing a lot of (international) testing friends and making new ones. Sunday evening there will a gathering in the Novotel where some geek testers get together to do some lightning talks and have fun (and beers). I will be attending the tutorials by Rikard Edgren and Michael D Kelly. I will be track chair on Tuesday afternoon and will do my own talk on Wednesday. Hope to see you there!

November 18 – 22 I will be in Potsdam Germany to attend Agile Testing Days. I will fly in on Saturday to attend Potslightning on Sunday. If you are in town, come and join us! Monday I will do a tutorial on Mind Mapping with Jean-Paul. Hope it will be as awesome as it was at TestNet where we did a half day try-out. The conference program looks awesome, I am sure I will enjoy many great talks. On Thursday I will do my own talk so don’t leave the conference too early 😉

The last week of my “sabbatical” will be full of testing activity as well: hosting a game night at TestNet, doing a testing dojo at Bartosz, having a brainstorm off-site with the TestNet board and do a talk at the Dutch Testing Day about exploratory testing. Hope to see you there as well.