Hey newsletter friends,

Social QA is officially shutting down for good. You probably saw this coming. I know I've been mulling it over for months now.

The reality is, after I really dove into parkour coaching, I started to doubt that I'd ever return to QA education. I started to want nothing to do with QA outside of my 9-5. My energy and thoughts have been elsewhere since May or June.

I haven't planned to seriously resume operations, especially since my parkour classes at the YMCA have been going well. I see more parkour coaching on the horizon for 2026. More community-building. More involvement with local political organizations and empowering my community to leverage technology in useful ways.

For example, I recently started helping out my local Indivisible chapter with managing their newsletter. They've got it set up on Zoho Campaigns and are still manually signing people up by asking them to email the newsletter manager (lol). It was impossible for me to ignore the opportunity to help them out, and they've welcomed it. I'm making new friends because of this! And I feel useful to my community. It's a great feeling.

The parents of my parkour students have been glowing ever since their kids started talking about my class, and it was bittersweet to see the end of my first 8-week session last Friday. The next session starts the first week of November and I already have a few students from the first session signing back up!

There's a lesson in there about secondhand praise being the most valuable kind. My wife showed up to see the last 15 minutes of last Friday's class and heard the moms telling her how much they loved my parkour class. I didn't find out until after they'd left with their kids. It's proof that I'm building something people care about, that actually makes a difference in kids' lives. And I want to keep doing more of that kind of stuff around here.

QA will always have educators who dedicate their time and energy to the craft. Artem Bondar is one of them. If you're not following his work, he's always on the cutting edge of QA tools and technologies. You should be keeping up with him and the content he posts. His courses are really affordable too, especially for Americans and for people whose employers offer PD stipends. One thing I've learned during my time writing the newsletter and selling my own products is how rough the exchange rate can be sometimes for countries on the other side of the globe. I can't really do much about that, but I know Artem does his best to make his courses accessible, given where he's located. Also no, Artem hasn't paid me to say any of this. I just like the guy and have enjoyed new skills I've gained from his API Testing Mastery course.

But you probably know that there are many other QA educators out there worth following. I still am not very fond of Michael Bolton and James Bach over at RST, but that's mostly because I don't like them as people. Their ideas about QA are solid, so don't let me stop you from looking them up or buying their book. I've had mostly heated or negative exchanges with them and they come off really petty and pedantic on social media. They seem like angry people to me.

And I get it, since QA can often be a thankless or even disrespected profession, but it really depends on the company and the team you work with. Kill 'em with kindness, and show why QA is valuable by helping out anywhere you can in the SDLC. If you're not getting anywhere by doing that, you're probably working for or with the wrong people. Find your tribe elsewhere if you can. But don't get sour about QA as a profession. It absolutely has a place in the AI era.

Anyway, I'm not gonna do some "going out of business sale" or anything dumb like that. I figure anyone who wanted stuff already got it, and I'm not interested in monitoring my Social QA email inbox for the next week or anything. I'm just ready to be done.

So, with that, I thank you all for reading! And for supporting me as a content creator last year, and early this year. To all my "Social QA Bootcamp"ers, I'm never going to forget all the fun we had learning and growing together. The Telegram chat will remain open but I won't be visiting it. It's there for you if you want to revisit the conversations we had. Shoutout to Ryley who's the only one to finish the entire thing! That was insane. I was really impressed he did that. And wouldn't you know it, he landed a job shortly afterward. I think that achievement is much less about me and much more about the tenacity and work he put into learning QA skills and technologies. What I mean is it's probably more of a "reverse causation" phenomenon. He didn't land the job because he finished the bootcamp. He finished the bootcamp because he was already the kind of person who'd be competitive for any entry-level QA job. He brought that energy to it. And there were bootcampers who landed jobs during the bootcamp and didn't finish it for that reason, and I'm really proud of them too!

Making the bootcamp, testing it, iterating on it, and running it was a collaborative effort between me and the students and instructors who gave me feedback. It was a beautiful and exciting experience. I'll always treasure it.

But I'm off to build the parkour community in Door County, Wisconsin. That's where my heart is right now, and that's where I want to grow. I've already learned a lot from my parkour coaching mentor, a 20-year parkour coaching veteran who was my coach when I was first starting parkour back in the 2010s. I've grown as a coach. I also see how much more room there is to continue growing. And grow I must.

Thanks for everything. You really made 2024 a special year for me. I hope I did at least something for you in return.

Cheers, and Happy Testing,

Steven 🧪