Thoughts on test automation, quality engineering, and lessons learned from two decades in QA.
Building a Python script that turns a Jira Epic's child tasks into a dependency matrix, a network diagram and a priority-aware build order - and why I replaced Mermaid's bundled layout engine with Graphviz along the way.
How I rebuilt a Playwright BDD demo mode - DOM overlay title cards, red/teal element highlights, and Examples-table field values - on top of Ruby, Cucumber and Selenium WebDriver, and had to build video recording myself with ffmpeg since Selenium has no equivalent of Playwright's built-in recorder.
How I added an opt-in demo mode to a Playwright BDD suite - DOM overlay title cards, red and teal element highlights, and named field-value pairs from the Gherkin Examples table read at runtime from the feature file.
A complete guide to all 82 tools exposed by the Playwright MCP server — grouped by function, with descriptions and concrete use cases. The planner, generator, and healer agents use fewer than 30 of them.
How I adapted the Playwright planner–generator–healer agent pipeline to produce Ruby + Cucumber + Capybara output instead of TypeScript — what stays the same, what changes, and where the locator translation table becomes critical.
I ran the same seven end-to-end tests against a live Oracle APEX e-commerce application in both Selenium Ruby and Playwright TypeScript, with Playwright at 1, 2, 3, and 4 workers. The results confirm some well-known theories, contradict others, and reveal exactly when parallelism stops helping and starts hurting.
How I wired up automatic Jira ticket creation and a Claude Code healer agent into a GitHub Actions Playwright workflow — and what five rounds of fixing taught me about the gap between 'passes tests' and 'good code'.
A walkthrough of a two-layer demo project that exposes a SQL Server database to Claude via a FastAPI REST API and an MCP stdio server — covering what each file does, where the API ends and the MCP begins, and what a production-ready version of this stack would look like.
How I built a six-agent CrewAI pipeline that researches any company from a URL and produces a 9-section interview preparation report — covering business model, tech stack, competitors, culture, and a tailored interview guide with specific questions to ask.
How I used Playwright's AI planner, generator and healer agents - driven by Claude Code - to build a maintainable end-to-end test suite for a real Oracle APEX e-commerce app, structured around a Page Component Object Model that makes self-healing actually work.
How a tiny custom Forge gadget fixed the alignment problem on a two-column Jira wallboard - and what I learned about building Jira Cloud apps along the way.
How I built a multi-source RAG system that indexes Jira, Confluence, SQL Server and GitHub into a single vector index and answers natural-language questions with grounded, cited answers.
How I built a lightweight Retrieval-Augmented Generation system that indexes a Confluence space, embeds the content locally, and answers natural-language questions with grounded citations back to the source pages.
How I built a complete observability stack using k6, Docker Compose, Prometheus, InfluxDB, Grafana and windows_exporter — running across two Windows 11 machines — to get real-time performance dashboards during load tests, and the challenges involved in making it all work.
How I built an end-to-end load testing solution using k6, Flask, psutil, pandas and Plotly — no Docker, Prometheus or Grafana required — that runs natively on two Windows 11 machines and generates a self-contained interactive dashboard.
A practical guide to running powerful LLMs without melting your daily driver — covering Ollama Cloud, LM Studio remote sharing via LM Link, and other strong alternatives for use with Roo Code and similar AI coding agents.
A single-pass SQL pattern using MERGE with OUTPUT to compare two tables and classify every difference as an insert, update or delete - with AI generating the query directly from the database schema.
A hands-on walkthrough of Playwright's AI-powered Test Agents — planner, generator and healer — and how using Grok to craft the right prompt made exploring this new technology effortless.
How I built a Playwright test project that connects directly to SQL Server using mssql and msnodesqlv8, enabling true end-to-end testing where UI actions are verified against the database - plus a look at alternative approaches.
A concise SQL pattern using CTEs and EXCEPT to compare two tables with the same schema and produce a clear change report showing inserts, updates and deletes - without writing column-by-column comparisons.
How I used SQL CTEs, LAG() window functions and UNION ALL to build a single query that stitches together change history from multiple tables - making it easy to verify that a reporting table stays in sync with its source data.