At the end of July I attended a Bug Whackathon at a Bellevue Startup incubator called Venture Mechanics. The event was co-hosted by them and the group Innovate QA to help assist local startups with testing their platforms and giving community members a chance to show off and hone their skills.
I had a great time meeting so many other engineers from different walks of life and seeing some new platforms. This was the first of planned events to help bridge this need and I look forward to the future events to see what changes it brings.
Seeing so many other QA Engineers and hearing their thought processes was a big help for me. I was able to find some issues with each platform I tested, but no major bugs. Black Box style testing was the main order of the day, though their were a few engineers their running their own software testing agents through LLMs.