Ruth Cheesley

Ruth is Digital Communications Manager at Cambridge Assessment English.

Managing both internal and external communications for the Digital and New Product Development Team, she sits within the Channels team.

Find out about all the exciting and innovative new technologies the team are working on at the BETA website.

Website URL: http://www.ruthcheesley.co.uk

Community has been part of my life as long as I remember.

From growing up in a small Dorset village to singing in choirs, joining the Sea Cadets and numerous groups at University, I've always found or built a 'tribe' around the things I care about.

Needless to say, when the opportunity to work as a Community Manager supporting an Open Source project which I am passionate about arose, I jumped at the chance and haven't looked back since.

Community Management is a truly diverse profession which allows me to bring my wide range of skills into action (and has forced me to learn a whole load of new skills to boot!).

Managing the Mautic community is wonderful job in many ways. It brings together my geekiness with my love of people and community. It allows me to channel my energies in a direction that allows me to help others succed, which one of my core values.

As many other CM's will tell you, it's also a real challenge. Working for a project that you are really passionate about makes it hard to switch off. Being a Community Manager for a community that never sleeps can lead to feeling like you are 'always available'. It's definitely a balancing act, but also a daily challenge and an exciting opportunity to help this Open Source project grow and thrive!

Screenshot of a Codeception test running

Learning to write acceptance tests with Codeception

13 April 2020 Published in Development

Having run the last two manual User Acceptance Test processes for Mautic 3, it was clear that relying on users to manually test every aspect of Mautic was both error prone and time consuming.

While we did surface some critical bugs, it took almost a full weekend to write up all the tests that needed to be done, and then another weekend (at least!) to run through the testing for Mautic 3 alpha.

We need to find a better solution to ensure that we're doing robust testing when we are shipping new releases of Mautic. I'd heard Codeception and acceptance tests mumbled about and seen it in our documentation that we had acceptance tests, so I started digging!

My first two weeks at Acquia

19 August 2019 Published in Community Management

It really doesn’t seem like it was only two weeks ago that I walked through the doors of the cleverly named ‘White Building’ in Reading (yes, you guessed it, it’s white!) to start my first day working for Acquia as Mautic Community Manager!

Working with internal and external thinkers in communities

12 July 2019 Published in Community Management

Have you ever watched discussions happening in your community where someone shares a thought or opinion, or responds with a message which does not appear to be thought through or doesn’t seem to have any substance?

Often, we frown on this kind of discussion and the person can even be ridiculed for their lack of understanding or clarity - posts get closed down or threads deleted for lack of substance.

How, then, do we cater for those in our communities - like myself - who are external thinkers?

Ruth Cheesley

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