You probably know that Microsoft’s Playwright is a solid tool for end-to-end testing, enabling you to control headless browsers and check essential user flows. But did you know that you can also use Playwright for API testing? If you didn’t, then this guide is for you. In this post, we’ll explore how Playwright can be used to test a GraphQL API (but don’t worry if you’re using REST; Playwright can handle any HTTP-based API).

You can write Playwright end-to-end testing code using JavaScript or TypeScript. Which one should you choose? When I started writing my first automated browser tests, I went with JavaScript because I couldn't be bothered with the type wrangling. I just wanted to get something off the ground quickly. YOLO, right? Today, though, there are two reasons why I last wrote a JavaScript-first Playwright test a very long time ago.

Application performance can make the difference between retaining or losing customers, with delays beyond a few seconds leading to dropped conversions. Performance testing and monitoring are vital for improving the overall user experience, achieving a competitive advantage, enhancing resource efficiency, enabling scalability, and reducing costs.

Speedscale leveraged Ephemeral / Preview Environments to help balance developer productivity and high-quality code by dynamically spinning mini-staging environments up and down on command for experimentation and deployment safety. The primary goals of the project were to reduce cloud infrastructure operating costs and increase deployment frequency. Benefits included speed, resource efficiency, and improved collaboration.

Ephemeral environments transform software development by providing temporary, isolated spaces for testing and deploying microservices without affecting production. Given its robust orchestration capabilities, Kubernetes excels at creating these temporary environments, allowing teams to efficiently manage and scale containerized applications. By integrating tools like Helm and Kustomize, developers can maintain a codified version of their app and its dependencies.

Adopting best practices for software deployment is essential to maintaining a high standard of quality, minimizing downtime, and ensuring that your applications meet user expectations. Here are five best practices to help you deploy your software more securely and reliably.

When testing and monitoring websites end to end with Playwright, choosing the right locators is crucial. Proper locators help create tests that are less flaky and more reliable. Let's explore user-first locators and how to filter locators for more robust tests.

Check out Ken Ahrens and Scott Moore as they discuss some blockers of developer productivity when building in Kubernetes, and how removing environment and data challenges can reduce toil and frustration! You can catch the full podcast on Scott’s page here: Scott Moore: Hey everybody out there in internet meme land. It’s time to hide your kids and hide your wife because it’s time for the SMC Journal podcast. Some of you will get that joke. Others will not.

I've been in the observability market long before it even had that name. Over the years, observability has undergone a significant transformation. As someone who has witnessed these changes firsthand, I can attest to the dynamic nature of this field. In the early days, it was largely about basic monitoring: tracking system metrics, lots of logs, and simple alerts.