My global speaking journy at Tech Conferences & Meetups in 2025
Written by - Millan Kaul
2025: A Year of Speaking & Sharing Quality Engineering Ideas
2025 has been an incredible journey for me. From keynotes at major international conferences to QA walk‑and‑talks, meetups, and mentoring.
Here I am sharing my learnings and memories of my: engagements, publications and community contributions this year.
TESTINGMIND TAS – Seattle, Washington 🇺🇸
TESTINGMIND’s Test Automation Summit SEATTLE | ONLINE
✨ Theme: The Next Generation Testing: AI in Quality Assurance and Beyond
| Link to TESTINGMIND - TAS Seattle 2025 conference |
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| Talk: Testing Microservices at Scale Using Chaos Engineering and Resilience in a Distributed World |
| Location: Seattle, Washington 🇺🇸 (later upgraded to online conference) – February 2025 |
Official Post TESTINGMIND Seattle 2025
CAST 2025 – Salt Lake City, Utah 🇺🇸
CAST Conference by Association for Software Testing (AST)
✨ Theme: Leading The Quality (R) Evolution
| Link to CAST 2025 conference |
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| Talk: 10 Moves that Define a Modern QA Leader |
| Location: Salt Lake City, Utah 🇺🇸 – August 2025 |
Also check: My CAST 2025 Post and CAST feed with updates
As part of conference discussions, I also joined a Live Stream The Quality Leadership Crisis”
PNSQC 2025 – Portland, Oregon 🇺🇸
Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) 2025 - 43rd conference
✨ Theme: QI: Increase Your Quality Intelligence
| Link to PNSQC 2025 conference |
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| Talk: Transforming Teams and Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) Through a Quality Engineering Mindset |
| Location: Portland, Oregon 🇺🇸 – October 2025 |
Also do check: My topic details and abstract
📑 ✍️ I am an author now with the PNSQC proceedings!
Through PNSQC conference I officially became an author in 2025 as they Published Book Proceedings of the Pacific NW Software Quality Conference 2025: QI: Increase Your Quality Intelligence (Paperback available on Amazon)
Don’t want to buy a book, no worries, here is my Published Camera-Ready Paper alongwith a linkedIn post on beauty of Portland with pictures 📸 and rose garden 🌹
Best Presenter award winner
I was awarded Best Presenter (top 3 of 50+ speakers) at PNSQC 2025. 🏆
⭐️ My first keynote —🎤
TESTINGMIND Conference, Canada 🇨🇦
TESTINGMIND Test Automation Summit (TAS) 2025
✨ Theme: The Next Generation Testing: AI in Quality Assurance and Beyond
| Link to TESTINGMIND, Vancouver, Canada 2025 conference |
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| Keynote: AI is Not Your Test Tool. It’s Your New Test Team. |
| Location: Pan Pacific Hotel, Vancouver, Canada 🇨🇦 – October 2025 |
Also check: My TESTINGMIND Post and Natalia Moyseyenko’s Post as well as the offical post from TESTINGMIND with interesting insights
Mentoring & Community Leadership
Topmate.io ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
For those who know me or have worked with me, you know my passion for mentoring. With that I signed up as an expert on Topmate.io to help and get others un-stuck!
Consistently received 5 out of 5 stars for mentoring sessions reflecting positive impact.
Later, on a weekly post, I was also recognized in Top 10 Incredible Creators on topmate.com
Mentors in Tech [MinT]
Shared my passion about Quality Engineering to graduates via Innovate QA with Mentors in Tech (MinT) —a company dedicated to mentoring people entering the tech industry.
Special QA meetup in Pune, India 🇮🇳
I hosted my first-ever meetup in India in 2025 with the support of QA Mentors team.
QA meetup in Pune, India 2025
| Link to PUNE special QA Meetup meetup |
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| Location: Pune, India 🇮🇳 – October 2025 |
I also shared some pictures with community
Innovate QA 2025 – Seattle Conference
Highlight: Co-Lead and hosted Seattle’s biggest and most successful quality conference in 2025, announcement from my account.
LinkedIn Video Coverage
Innovate QA – San Francisco Meetup Launch
Followed by a huge success and demand after full day conference in Seattle, I extended Innovate QA Events reach by inaugurating the first Innovate QA meetup outside Seattle in San Francisco, California 🇺🇸 with support and help of trynova.ai as well as LambdaTest .
Innovate QA #SF (Bay area): Inaugural Quality Leadership Meetup
| Link to Innovate QA #SF meetup |
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| Location: San Francisco, California 🇺🇸 – June 2025 |
2024 Speaking Engagements (Leading into 2025)
While I missed to post My speaking engagements and meetups that I hosted in Canada - both in Vancouver and Toronto, here are some key event partneships that led to more opportunities.
Innovate QA – Microsoft Reactor, Redmond, Washington 🇺🇸
Event: Innovate QA meetup at Microsoft Reactor
Talk: Raising the Bar with Pragmatic Testing of Microservices
Location: Microsoft Reactor, Redmond, Washington 🇺🇸 – July 2024
Highlights: Despite a demo failure at a critical step (demo gods weren’t with me that day!), I left a lasting impact on the audience, many of whom became part of my professional network.
Here is a post meetup update on LinkedIn
I also spoke later in Nov 2024 at the same meetup on a leadership topic: Taking Quality Engineering Leadership to the next level (PART 2)
I delivered PART 1 in Toronto Ontario, Canada 🇨🇦 as The Test Tribe’s first-ever meetup in Toronto in October 2024.
QA Walk & Talk – Vancouver, Canada 🇨🇦
This specific open to all QA community event was in my wishlist for a while and I made it as my last event of 2025 a easy yet brilliant initiative of QA and non-QA’s joining a walk in world famous Stanley park in Vancouver and havuing a genuine open discussion called as “QA Walk & Talk”.
I particularly liked it because there was no stage or mic — everyone was a speaker and a listener and I really enjoyed listening after delivering multiple talks throughout the year.
Each conversation I had was full of learnings, perspective and “oh wow!” moments for me.
QA Walk & Talk in Vancouver, Canada
✨ Theme: literally and strictly! NO THEME.
| Location & dates: Vancouver, Canada 🇨🇦 | Date: October 2025 |
Organized by the amazing Yaroslav here is my post with more pictures.
Here is what I will take-away from own my learning and speaking journey of 2025
#1 I am grateful for the opportunities I’ve had to share my thoughts on Leadership at Scale. Through my keynotes and talks at conferences like CAST, PNSQC, and TESTINGMIND, along with a published paper, I’ve been fortunate to contribute to discussions on quality engineering leadership. It’s heartening to see how these conversations can inspire others in our field.
#2 Building a sense of community has been a rewarding journey too. From mentoring on Topmate to launching and hosting meetups in various cities, I’ve witnessed how these connections can create a ripple effect, and how genuine relationships can amplify as a collective positive impact.
Reflecting on 2025, I’ve learned the most meaningful insights come from collaboration. Whether on stage or during QA walks, the human connections matter. I look forward to continuing this journey of learning and sharing in 2026.”
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