Ch.04 · How I keep up
Six things, done properly.
Manual and automation, API and database, performance and AI tooling. Each one opens to the tools behind it and one line of evidence, because a claim with nothing under it is just a word in a list.
Six things, done properly.
The part automation cannot do. Reading a spec, finding the case nobody wrote down, and reproducing it reliably.
- Test design
- Exploratory charters
- Regression strategy
- UAT
- Defect triage
✓Designed and ran the test suites for 15+ delivered projects.
End-to-end suites that survive a redesign, on web and Android, wired into CI so they run without being asked.
- Playwright
- Selenium
- Appium
- Pytest
- CI pipelines
✓Automated payout and instant-send workflows end to end; Appium suites for Android.
Contract and behaviour checks against the endpoints behind the UI, including the auth and idempotency edges the UI never shows you.
- Postman
- Newman
- REST
- Auth flows
- Contract validation
✓Collection-driven API suites run in CI alongside the UI layer.
A green UI means nothing if the row is wrong. I check the database directly and reconcile it against what the API claimed.
- SQL
- DB verification
- Reconciliation
- Audit trails
✓Post-transaction DB checks on payment, payout and cashback flows.
Load and throughput on the flows that actually cost money: withdrawals, transactions, checkout under concurrency.
- JMeter
- Load profiling
- Throughput analysis
✓JMeter scripts for withdrawal and high-volume transaction flows.
I use these every day for test design, failure triage, scripting, and reading a codebase I did not write. Then I used them to build Aegis-QA, the internal tool that holds all of this together.
- Claude
- Claude Code (CLI)
- ChatGPT
- Cursor
- GitHub Copilot
- Kimi 2.5
- Emergent
- Datadog AI
✓Used them to build Aegis-QA. Runs, API tests, SQL, Datadog and recorded scripts in one place.
Automation
- Playwright
- Selenium
- Appium
- Pytest
- Newman / Postman
Languages
- Python
- JavaScript
- TypeScript
- SQL
AI tooling
- Claude
- Claude Code (CLI)
- ChatGPT
- Cursor
- GitHub Copilot
- Kimi 2.5
- Emergent
- Datadog AI
Performance
- JMeter
- Load profiling
- Transaction throughput
Domains
- Crypto payments
- Fintech
- KYB / KYC
- E-commerce
- Games
Platform
- FastAPI
- Next.js
- Docker
- AWS EC2
- CI pipelines
Next
Why any of it matters →Six real defects, injected into a real page, caught by a real suite. Quality is an opinion until an assertion fails.