Software QA and Testing

**🗓 English Speaking Club — Saturday Meetup at Stars Coffee (Arbat, 19)** Want to practice your English, meet new people, and have some fun? **Join our English Speaking Club this Saturday at 15:00 at Stars Coffee (ул. Арбат, 19)! ☕️** 💬 **What to Expect:** We meet in a **friendly atmosphere to chat 1-on-1 in English — every 15–20 minutes you’ll switch partners**, so you get to talk to many different people. **After that, we play some English board games** — it’s a great way to relax, laugh, and keep practicing naturally. 🎲✨ ⏳ **Duration:** *Around 2.5 hours total:* *🗣 2 hours of chatting* *☕️ 5-min break* *🎯 25 min of English games* 👥 **Who Can Join:** *Our club welcomes everyone from Intermediate to Advanced (B2–C2) levels. We’re here to practice and get better together.* 💵 **Price & Registration:** * 🇷🇺 **For locals:** 600₽ *+ a drink at the café* * 📱 **Sign up in advance** *via* [Telegram-bot](https://t.me/Payment_RealTalkEnglish_bot) * ✨ **If it’s your first time**, *you can pay at the meeting — welcome!* * 🌍 ***For foreigners: FREE entry — no sign-up required!*** ⚡️ **Club Rules:** * ***Speak English only.*** * ***Don’t “teach” or correct others unless they ask for help.*** * ***Be respectful and open-minded — we’re all here to connect and learn together.*** * ***Don’t impose your religious, political, or other personal views on others.*** * ***Please order a drink or snack to support the café that hosts us.*** ☕️ ✏️ **Questions?** *Don't hesitate to reach out to Kirill via* [WhatsApp](https://wa.me/+79857387761) / [Telegram](https://t.me/RealTalkSpeakingClub). **💻 Stay connected:** [Our Telegram channel](https://t.me/RealTalk_english_speaking_club) [Our VK](https://vk.com/yourrealtalk)

**🗓 English Speaking Club — Saturday Meetup at Stars Coffee (Arbat, 19)** Want to practice your English, meet new people, and have some fun? **Join our English Speaking Club this Saturday at 15:00 at Stars Coffee (ул. Арбат, 19)! ☕️** 💬 **What to Expect:** We meet in a **friendly atmosphere to chat 1-on-1 in English — every 15–20 minutes you’ll switch partners**, so you get to talk to many different people. **After that, we play some English board games** — it’s a great way to relax, laugh, and keep practicing naturally. 🎲✨ ⏳ **Duration:** *Around 2.5 hours total:* *🗣 2 hours of chatting* *☕️ 5-min break* *🎯 25 min of English games* 👥 **Who Can Join:** *Our club welcomes everyone from Intermediate to Advanced (B2–C2) levels. We’re here to practice and get better together.* 💵 **Price & Registration:** * 🇷🇺 **For locals:** 600₽ *+ a drink at the café* * 📱 **Sign up in advance** *via* [Telegram-bot](https://t.me/Payment_RealTalkEnglish_bot) * ✨ **If it’s your first time**, *you can pay at the meeting — welcome!* * 🌍 ***For foreigners: FREE entry — no sign-up required!*** ⚡️ **Club Rules:** * ***Speak English only.*** * ***Don’t “teach” or correct others unless they ask for help.*** * ***Be respectful and open-minded — we’re all here to connect and learn together.*** * ***Don’t impose your religious, political, or other personal views on others.*** * ***Please order a drink or snack to support the café that hosts us.*** ☕️ ✏️ **Questions?** *Don't hesitate to reach out to Kirill via* [WhatsApp](https://wa.me/+79857387761) / [Telegram](https://t.me/RealTalkSpeakingClub). **💻 Stay connected:** [Our Telegram channel](https://t.me/RealTalk_english_speaking_club) [Our VK](https://vk.com/yourrealtalk)

🗓 **English Speaking Club — Sunday Meetup at Stars Coffee (Butyrskiy Val, 10)** Want to practice your English, meet new people, and have some fun? *Join our English Speaking Club this Sunday at 14:00 at Stars Coffee (ул. Бутырский Вал, 10)! ☕️* 💬 **What to Expect:** We meet in a **friendly atmosphere to chat 1-on-1 in English — every 15–20 minutes you’ll switch partners**, so you get to talk to many different people. **After that, we play some English board games** — it’s a great way to relax, laugh, and keep practicing naturally. 🎲✨ ⏳ **Duration:** *Around 2 hours total:* 🗣 *1.5 hours of chatting* ☕️ *5-min break* 🎯 *25 min of English games* 👥 **Who Can Join:** *Our club welcomes everyone from Intermediate to Advanced (B2–C2) levels. We’re here to practice and get better together.* 💵 **Price & Registration:** * 🇷🇺 **For locals: 600₽** *+ a drink at the café* * 📱 **Sign up in advance** *via* [Telegram-bot](https://t.me/Payment_RealTalkEnglish_bot) * ✨ **If it’s your first time**, *you can pay at the meeting — welcome!* * 🌍 ***For foreigners: FREE entry — no sign-up required!*** ⚡️ **Club Rules:** * ***Speak English only.*** * ***Don’t “teach” or correct others unless they ask for help.*** * ***Be respectful and open-minded — we’re all here to connect and learn together.*** * ***Don’t impose your religious, political, or other personal views on others.*** * ***Please order a drink or snack to support the café that hosts us.*** ☕️ ✏️ **Questions?** *Don't hesitate to reach out to Kirill via* [WhatsApp ](https://wa.me/+79857387761) / [Telegram](https://t.me/RealTalkSpeakingClub). **💻 Stay connected:** [Our Telegram channel](https://t.me/RealTalk_english_speaking_club) [Our VK](https://vk.com/yourrealtalk)

A Path Forward – Grand Opening & 2-Year Anniversary Celebration! Join us as we celebrate the Grand Opening of A Path Forward’s new Leesburg studio and mark two years of supporting mothers through every stage of motherhood. A Path Forward is a maternal wellness studio offering integrated lactation support, strength-based fitness, nutrition coaching, and restorative therapies designed to help moms rebuild strength, confidence, and balance — not just “bounce back.” This open-house style event is an opportunity to: * Tour the new studio space * Learn about our services, including Red Light Therapy * Meet the founder and local providers * Ask questions and explore how A Path Forward can support you in your current season * Enjoy light refreshments sponsored by Robin with 'Keeping It Real' Real Estate * Community Connection **Give-A-Ways!** We wil be doing 2 give-a-ways at the top of every hour. * 10:00AM, 11:00AM, 12:00PM and 1:00PM Whether you’re pregnant, postpartum, a toddler mom, or simply ready to prioritize your own wellbeing again, this celebration is for you. Come celebrate a new chapter, a new space, and a shared commitment to supporting moms in our Loudoun community. We can’t wait to welcome you.

In this talk, Sean Hoar will explore how AI assistants can accelerate different stages of software development. From idea generation and prototyping to coding, testing, and debugging, AI tools are transforming how developers work. He’ll provide practical examples of where AI can save time, reduce errors, and help teams focus on higher-level problem-solving. Attendees will leave with actionable strategies to integrate AI into their workflow and stay ahead in the evolving tech landscape.

**The Test Tribe 2nd Washington Meetup – Designing a Modern QA Organization: Structure, Skills, and Shared Ownership** AI is accelerating software delivery at an unprecedented pace-but speed without structure introduces serious risk. In today’s landscape, the traditional “testing bottleneck” isn’t just a delay-it’s a business liability. This session explores how Quality Engineering must evolve from a siloed function into a strategic, distributed capability-one that balances rapid AI adoption with strong human oversight. Moving beyond basic automation, this talk introduces the concept of Distributed Quality Governance, where quality becomes a shared responsibility across engineering, product, and leadership. Expect a practical, leadership-focused discussion that cuts through AI hype and addresses the real challenges of testing complex, AI-assisted systems-while ensuring accountability, trust, and long-term resilience. **Event Details** * **Date: 21st January 2026 (Wednesday)** * **Time: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM EDT** * **Location: 1501 Langston Blvd. Arlington, Virginia** **Session: Designing a Modern QA Organization: Structure, Skills, and Shared Ownership** **Speaker: Alekhya Guduri** **About the Session** In an era where AI-generated code is accelerating delivery, quality can no longer be treated as a final checkpoint. Instead, it must be embedded, intentional, and governed. In this session, Alekhya Guduri presents a blueprint for building a modern QA organization that operates as a strategic business function. You’ll learn how to shift from centralized testing teams to shared ownership models, while introducing guardrails that ensure responsible AI use across the delivery pipeline. From defining a Materiality Matrix to identify where AI risks are too high to ignore, to implementing Human-in-the-Loop frameworks, this talk provides actionable guidance for leaders navigating AI-driven engineering environments. **Key Takeaways** * The Materiality Matrix: How to objectively prioritize AI risks based on business impact and technical complexity * Distributed Governance: Transitioning from centralized QA to shared ownership in AI-driven CI/CD pipelines * Responsible AI Guardrails: Practical Human-in-the-Loop frameworks to prevent bias, hallucinations, and silent failures **About the Speaker** Alekhya Guduri is a seasoned technology leader whose career sits at the intersection of engineering execution, operational excellence, and innovation. As Director of Engineering at Indeed, she focuses on building high-performing organizations that treat quality as a strategic advantage, not a last-mile activity. With deep experience scaling complex systems and leading cross-functional teams, Alekhya works at the forefront of shaping how AI and human judgment coexist within modern software delivery. She is a strong advocate for distributed governance, responsible AI practices, and the evolution of Quality Engineering into a trusted business partnership. **Why You Should Attend** * Learn how to design QA organizations for AI-driven delivery * Understand how to balance speed with responsibility in modern pipelines * Gain leadership frameworks for shared ownership of quality * Move beyond AI hype to practical, defensible testing strategies * Connect with Washington-area QA, engineering, and tech leaders **About The Test Tribe** **The Test Tribe** is the world’s largest software testing community, empowering testers globally since 2018. With 7**00+ events** and **150K+ members** across **130+ countries**, we bring testers together to learn, grow, and connect through meetups, conferences, cohorts, masterclasses, and more. By RSVPing, you agree to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy and consent to be contacted by The Test Tribe and our event partners.

NOVA Code and Coffee is an inclusive, informal, co-working session. People of all skill levels are invited. The concept is simple, bring a laptop and ideas, we'll provide the coffee and donuts! Here's how it works: 1. At 10:15 everyone introduces themselves and briefly describes what brought them to Code & Coffee today (project, homework, networking, etc) 2. For the rest of the day, folks work in the communal space on their projects providing one another help and conversation as needed. Oh and they usually drink coffee and tea too! That's it! Hope to see you there! **Location** Our hosts are the Fairfax City Economic Development Building: [10300 Eaton Pl, Fairfax, VA 22030](https://www.bing.com/ck/a?!&&p=d7298231ca2df594df822003f9a93517c788fceefe1fcbb79c8976696e341bc6JmltdHM9MTc1MzIyODgwMA&ptn=3&ver=2&hsh=4&fclid=180d0745-3b7f-69a1-23a2-11433a7868e5&u=a1L21hcHM_Jm1lcGk9MTA5fn5Ub3BPZlBhZ2V-QWRkcmVzc19MaW5rJnR5PTE4JnE9RmFpcmZheCUyMENpdHklMjBFY29ub21pYyUyMERldmVsb3BtZW50JnNzPXlwaWQuWU44NzN4ODI4MTk2Mjg0NTk5MDM4MTU0MiZwcG9pcz0zOC44NjE0NDYzODA2MTUyMzRfLTc3LjMwMjE3NzQyOTE5OTIyX0ZhaXJmYXglMjBDaXR5JTIwRWNvbm9taWMlMjBEZXZlbG9wbWVudF9ZTjg3M3g4MjgxOTYyODQ1OTkwMzgxNTQyfiZjcD0zOC44NjE0NDZ-LTc3LjMwMjE3NyZ2PTImc1Y9MSZGT1JNPU1QU1JQTA&ntb=1) Conference Room A- Large, Floor 1 This is a new venue for us, so give us some time to get more details about it. Driving is the best option. There is plenty of free on-site parking. Otherwise, we are a 22 minute bus from the Vienna Metro Station. **Sponsored by:** Thank you [Fairfax City Economic Development](https://gofairfaxcity.com/) and [Mason Enterprise Center](https://enterprise.gmu.edu/) for making this event possible! **Thank you so much to our wonderful sponsors!** Organized by [DMV Petri Dish](https://www.dmvpetridish.com/) **[Code of Conduct](https://github.com/NoVACodeCoffee/admin/blob/master/code-of-conduct.md):** We value the participation of each member of the community and want all attendees to have an enjoyable and fulfilling experience. To make clear what is expected, all delegates/attendees, organizers, and volunteers at any Nova Code & Coffee events are required to conform to our [Code of Conduct](https://github.com/NoVACodeCoffee/admin/blob/master/code-of-conduct.md).

Join us for another session of our study group as we dive into the fascinating world of Large Language Models (LLMs) using the book **Build a Large Language Model from Scratch** from Manning. In this session, we will finish **Chapter 7: Fine-tuning to follow instructions**. In the last session, we talked about how to prepare the dataset for instruction fine-tuning and in this session we will perform the fine-tuning and evaluate the model afterwards. This isn't just a lecture! Come ready to ask questions, share insights, and code along. Whether you're a beginner or have some experience, this is the perfect opportunity to build a strong foundation together. If you plan to work with the code on your own laptop during the session, try and set-up the environment ahead of time (https://github.com/rasbt/LLMs-from-scratch/tree/main/setup). We will be meeting at the North County Governmental Center this time that is across from the Reston public library.

Gaming, AdTech, EdTech, Media Streaming, and FinTech are just a few of the workloads where high-availability cloud infrastructure matters. Whether you’re doing battle daily in one of these spaces or are just curious about ways to improve performance, meet us in Reston for an in-person discussion on bare metal cloud architecture. You’ll meet our product lead, James MacKenzie, who will walk through how modern bare metal serves as a control plane for hybrid and private cloud architectures. **What we will cover** * Ways to leverage bare metal, containers, and orchestration for better performance and predictable economics; * Real-world hybrid, disaster recovery, and data-intensive architectures; * Our approach to eliminating ingress and egress fees. **Who should attend** * Cloud architects and platform engineers; * DevOps professionals and infrastructure leads; * FinOps stakeholders managing data-heavy or hybrid workloads. **Why attend** This is a technical, architecture-first conversation. You will leave with a clearer understanding of high-availability cloud infrastructure and how organizations are scaling cost-effectively. Food and drinks will be provided. Space is limited to keep the discussion interactive.