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The Moment I Realised UI Testing Wasn't Enough Three years into my QA career, I thought I was doing well. I had a solid Selenium suite running. Regression coverage was green. Stakeholders were happy. Then a production incident happened. A payment API was returning incorrect amounts under a specific condition. The UI looked perfect — amounts displayed correctly after rounding. But the raw API response? Off by a significant margin. My entire test suite missed it. Every single test. Because I was only testing what users saw . Not what the system was actually doing . That incident changed how I approached QA forever. 👇 Why API Testing Is the Most Underrated Skill in QA Let me be direct about something. Most QA engineers treat API testing as a secondary skill. Something you do with Postman when a developer asks you to verify an endpoint. A quick sanity check before moving on. That's the wrong mental model entirely. Here's the truth after 7.5 years: The API layer is where your product actually lives. The UI is a presentation layer. It shows users a version of the truth. But the API? That's the truth itself. Data contracts, business logic, validation rules, error handling — all of it lives at the API layer. If you're only testing the UI, you're testing the packaging. Not the product. My API Testing Journey — Tool by Tool Let me walk you through exactly how my API testing practice evolved, and what each tool actually taught me. Stage 1 — Postman: Learning to Think in Requests Postman was my entry point. And it's still the tool I reach for first when exploring a new API. But most people use Postman wrong. They treat it like a manual testing tool — fire a request, check the response, move on. That's wasting 80% of what Postman can do. Here's how I actually use it: Collections + Environments = your real power combo // Environment variables — not hardcoded values {{ base_url }} /api/ v1 / users / {{ user_id }} // Switch between dev/staging/prod by changing one environment // No

How I Fixed Bugs in 30+ Open Source Projects (And What I Learned) Over the past few months, I've been contributing to open source as an independent developer. No big company backing, no team — just me, a laptop, and a lot of caffeine. Along the way, I've submitted pull requests to 30+ repositories across the Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Rust ecosystems. Here's what I learned from the process — the good, the bad, and the "I wish someone told me this earlier." Why Contribute to Open Source? Let's get the obvious out of the way: it's not about the money (at least not directly). Most bounties pay $50-$500, and you'll spend 10-20 hours on a single PR if it involves deep codebase exploration. The real value is: Reputation — Each merged PR is a public signal that you can read, understand, and improve other people's code Learning — You'll see how major projects are structured, tested, and maintained Network — Maintainers remember helpful contributors. Jobs come from these relationships Scratching your own itch — Fix a bug that annoys you? Everyone benefits My Process: Finding Good Issues Step 1: Pick the Right Projects Not all projects are equally welcoming to new contributors. Here's my filter: Signal Good ✅ Bad ❌ Response time < 7 days > 30 days or never Issue labels good first issue , help wanted None CI/CD Green, fast builds Broken, 30min+ builds PR merge rate > 60% of open PRs merge < 20% merge Step 2: Find Issues You Can Actually Fix I look for: Bug reports with clear reproduction steps — Someone already did the hard work of identifying what's wrong Issues labeled easy-fix or similar — The maintainer thinks it's approachable Issues in domains I know — Don't pick a C++ compiler bug if you've never written C++ Step 3: Before Writing Code This is where most beginners fail. Don't start coding yet! Read the CONTRIBUTING.md — Every project has different style, commit message format, and PR requirements Look at recent merged PRs — What do good PRs in this project look

A few months ago, while interviewing for a Cloud Solutions Architect role at Microsoft, one of the interviewers asked me a question that stuck with me long after the interview ended. Not because I couldn't answer it. But because I kept thinking about whether I had answered it well. The question was: "What's the hardest part about working on mainframe technology?" At the time, I was still relatively new to the world of mainframes. And by "relatively new," I mean embarrassingly new. Before joining my current company, I didn't even know something called a "mainframe" still existed. If you'd asked me what COBOL was, I probably would've guessed it was a Pokémon. Okay that is an exaggeration but you get what I mean. I still remember early on hearing terms like KT (Knowledge Transfer) being thrown around and quietly wondering if everyone had received some secret corporate dictionary except me. The good news is that I've never been particularly afraid of looking stupid. So my strategy is simple: Ask the question. Then ask the follow-up question. Then ask the question that reveals I didn't understand the previous answer either. Surprisingly, people were usually happy to explain. Anyway, after a few KT sessions and what I'd generously describe as a "bare minimum amount of research," my brain went where most developers' brains probably would've gone. The technology The age The tooling The learning curve The fact that some of these systems were designed before I was even born All perfectly reasonable answers. But while I was sitting there in the interview, another thought appeared: "This feels too obvious." Interviewers at that level usually aren't asking for the first answer that comes to mind. They're trying to understand how you think. And the more I reflected on that question afterwards, the more I realized something interesting. The hardest part isn't the technology itself. Before I started working around large enterprise systems, my mental model of old technology was pret

Most people studying for Security+ use practice questions the wrong way. They take a 90 question set, score a 74, feel bad, take another set the next day, score a 76, and call that progress. Two weeks later the number has barely moved and they have no idea why. The score is the least useful thing a practice exam gives you. What you actually want is a map of what you do not know yet. Here is the approach that worked for getting through SY0-701 without burning out on endless question sets. Start cold, on purpose Before you study a single domain, take a full practice exam and do not look anything up. It will feel bad. That is the point. A cold score tells you where you actually stand, not where your notes say you should be. SY0-701 is split into five domains, and they are not weighted evenly: 1.0 General Security Concepts (12%) 2.0 Threats, Vulnerabilities, and Mitigations (22%) 3.0 Security Architecture (18%) 4.0 Security Operations (28%) 5.0 Security Program Management and Oversight (20%) Domain 4 alone is more than a quarter of the exam. If you bomb Security Operations and ace General Concepts, splitting your time evenly between them is a mistake. A cold diagnostic shows you that split in about an hour. If you want one to start with, there is a free diagnostic exam at secplusmastery.com/diagnostic that breaks your result down by domain so the holes are easy to see. Review the wrong answers, and the right ones too This single habit moved my scores more than anything else: for every question I missed, I wrote down why each wrong option was wrong, not just why the correct one was correct. Security+ loves distractors that are real terms used in the wrong context. A question about a control that prevents an attack will offer you a control that detects one, and a control that corrects after the fact, all as plausible answers. If you only learn that the answer was C, you learn nothing you can reuse. If you learn that B was a detective control and the scenario asked for a p

My daughter Emma is 11. She's been vibe coding lately, and honestly, she's pretty good at it. The...

If you've ever tried to use an AI resume builder, you've probably hit the same wall I did. You sign up, poke around, find the one feature you actually need — and then boom: "Upgrade to Pro for $29/month." It's frustrating. Resume help shouldn't be locked behind a paywall. So I built my own. Meet Persona Persona is an AI-powered resume builder that you run completely on your own machine . No deployment required. No subscription. No account on some third-party service. You clone the repo, set it up, and it's yours. It's a fork of the excellent open-source project ResumeLM , but I've added a bunch of features I couldn't find anywhere else — especially around local AI and template variety. 👉 GitHub: github.com/nithiin7/persona (Drop a ⭐ if you find it useful!) The Big Deal: Run AI Completely Offline with Ollama This is the feature I'm most proud of. Most AI resume tools call out to OpenAI or Anthropic and charge you for every request. Persona supports Ollama — which means you can run the AI model locally on your own hardware, with zero API costs and zero data leaving your machine. Here's how simple it is: Install Ollama on your computer Pull any model ( ollama pull llama3 , for example) Open Persona's settings, point it to your local Ollama URL Done — the AI now runs entirely on your machine No OpenAI key. No Anthropic key. No usage limits. Your resume data never touches an external server. If you do want to use cloud models, Persona supports those too — GPT-5, Claude Opus 4.7, Claude Sonnet 4.6, and a handful of open-source models via OpenRouter. But the Ollama path is what makes this genuinely different from everything else out there. It's 100% Free — Everything Unlocked The original ResumeLM had Stripe payments baked in. I ripped all of that out. Every single feature in Persona is available to every user, always. There's no "Pro plan." There's no feature gating. You self-host it, you own it, you use all of it. 10 Resume Templates Persona ships with ten distinct templ

I'm a 17-year-old IT student from Luxembourg. A few months ago I got tired of spending 2-3 hours a day manually browsing Upwork, Malt, and Freelancer looking for projects. So I built an automation system that does it for me — 24/7, on a Raspberry Pi 3. Here's what it does, how I built it, and every painful lesson I learned along the way. What the system does Scans Upwork, Malt, and Freelancer every 30 minutes Scores each job 0–100 with AI based on my profile Generates proposals in English, French, and German Sends the best jobs to Telegram with inline A/B buttons Tracks which proposal style gets more replies Sends daily stats and weekly market trend reports Reminds me to follow up after 3 days The stack n8n — self-hosted workflow automation (Docker on Raspberry Pi 3) Groq API (Llama 3.1-8b-instant) — AI scoring and proposal generation Supabase — PostgreSQL database for jobs, proposals, clients SerpAPI — searching job boards via Google Apify — scraping Upwork listings Telegram Bot API — alerts and bot commands Cloudflare Tunnel — HTTPS for webhooks Total running cost: ~$5/month. 7 workflows 01 - Job Discovery — runs every 30 minutes, searches 10+ sources, deduplicates via Supabase unique constraint on URL 02 - Proposal Generator — AI scores the job, generates two proposal variants (formal vs hook-first), sends to Telegram with A/B buttons 03 - Follow-up Reminders — checks Supabase every 3 days for unanswered proposals 04 - CRM via Telegram — full client management through bot commands (/jobs, /stats, /clients) 05 - Market Intelligence — daily report: how many jobs found, average score, top platforms 06 - Trend Analysis — weekly report on what skills are trending in automation 07 - Lead Generation — finds companies actively using Zapier or Make who might want to switch to n8n Lessons learned (the hard way) 1. Cyrillic text breaks JSON body nodes silently If you have Cyrillic characters in a JSON body field with newlines, n8n throws a "Bad control character" error. Kee

This is a story about a company that rolled out an AI interview system — and the lunch break I spent...

TL;DR As an international student in the United States, I joined tech communities hoping to find...

A few months ago I was trying to prepare for a cloud certification exam. I went looking for practice questions - good ones. Not just answer lists, but questions that actually trained the reasoning the exam tests. I found some scattered GitHub repos, a few YouTube playlists, sites with outdated question dumps. Nothing that felt structured. Nothing that explained why an answer was right, not just what it was. So I started building my own study tool. Mock questions, practice sets, AI-generated explanations. The kind of thing I wished existed. Six weeks later that became ArchReady - a certification prep platform for AWS, GCP, and PSM1. It's live now. What it does Practice questions across AWS (CCP, SAA, DVA, SAP), GCP ACE, and PSM1 Explanations for wrong answers - walks through the reasoning, not just the correct option AI-powered explanations coming soon Claude (Anthropic) Confidence tracking - shows which topics you're weak on Free to practice, no signup required. Pro unlocks full history and tracking. The stack Frontend: Next.js 14 (App Router) Backend: FastAPI (Python) AI: Claude (Anthropic) - explanations launching soon Payments: Dodo Hosting: Vercel (web) + Railway (API) Nothing exotic. I kept it boring on purpose - solo founder, 2-5 hrs/week, I can't afford interesting infrastructure problems. What I actually learned Ship before it feels ready. I had a list of 12 features I thought were "required for launch." I launched with 4. Nobody noticed the missing 8. Questions sourced from open-source + AI is good enough to start. Questions come from curated GitHub repos and AI-generated content built around official exam frameworks. That's enough to be useful. Perfection is a later problem. The hardest part isn't building - it's the first 10 users. The product exists. Getting people to try it is the actual work now. Where it is today Live at archready.io . Early stage. Still building. If you're prepping for AWS, GCP, or PSM1 - try it free, no account needed. Honest feedba

Writing a prompt isn't engineering. It's typing. You type what you want. The AI figures out the rest...

Hey everyone! I'm a Front-End developer with over 4.5 years of hands-on experience building scalable, performant web applications. I'm currently looking for a full-time remote opportunity. i could make modern web applications using Next.js or React.js & fueled by a passion for solving complex problems, diving into intricate challenges, and crafting clean, scalable solutions that deliver seamless user experiences. 🛠 Tech Stack: React.js & Next.js (SSR, SSG, App Router) TypeScript & JavaScript (ES6+) - Node.js - Express.js REST APIs & state management (Zustand, React Query) CSS/Tailwind/Styled Components , many Animation packages Git, CI/CD basics, Docker performance-optimization & SEO friendly Application Time Management – Responsible – Open mind – Team work – Attention to detail Commitment to work – Continuous learning 💼 What I bring: 4.5+ years building production-grade UIs Strong focus on performance, accessibility, and clean code Experience working in agile, remote-friendly teams Good communication and ability to work independently across time zones 🌍 Availability: Full-time/Part-time remote | Open to companies worldwide 🌐 My Portfolio ⬇️⬇️ https://pouyaazhkan.vercel.app/ 👨🏻‍💻My GitHub ⬇️⬇️ https://github.com/PouyaAzhkan 📩 Email Me ⬇️⬇️ codpoya.azhkan@gmail.com Feel free to DM me or drop a comment — happy to share my portfolio and discuss further! forhire #frontend #react #nextjs #typescript #remotework #webdeveloper #developer #Front_End #hiredeveloper #hire

I said "maybe a couple days" on a call last Tuesday. By Wednesday morning it was in a Jira ticket as "2 days." By Thursday afternoon somebody was checking in to see if we were tracking against the two day commitment. Nobody did anything wrong. The person who wrote it down was capturing what I said. The person checking in was doing their job. I was the one who said the words. The system worked exactly as designed. The system is the problem. Something Ive learned is that theres no such thing as a rough number in meetings today with all of the AI note takers... The moment you say a number out loud, it stops being a feeling and starts being a quote. The hedge in front of it doesnt survive the transcription. "Maybe" disappears. "Couple" gets rounded to a specific integer. "Give or take" is the first thing that hits the cutting room floor. What lands in the document is the number, naked, with no caveats and no error bars. Everyone in the meeting heard what you heard. They heard the hedge. They watched you wave your hands. They understood, in the moment, that you werent committing. But the document doesnt remember any of that. The document just remembers the number. And the document outlives the conversation, which is where all the nuance lived. Ive watched myself do this for years and I still get caught by it. Someone asks how long something will take. I want to be helpful. I want to seem confident. I want to keep the meeting moving. So I say a number. The number is approximately right, or at least I think it is, but I havent actually thought about it the way you would think about it if you were going to commit to it. By saying it out loud, Ive committed to it. The fix, if theres one, is to refuse the number. Not rudely. Just clearly. "I need to look at it before I give you a real number. I can have one for you by Friday." This works about half the time. The other half, somebody in the room is going to ask you for a ballpark anyway, and youre going to give them one, and t

Field journal of Dr. E. Rempel, Department of Minority Neurological Studies, University of New Carthage (A work of fiction. "Allism" is a real term used by some autistic people to describe the neurological profile of the non-autistic majority.) March 3, 2089 I have now spent three months embedded with an allistic community in the outer provinces. Allism, for those unfamiliar, is a rare neurological variant affecting approximately 1% of our population. My colleagues at the University have long debated its origins and persistence. After direct observation, I am no more certain of the answers, but I have accumulated a remarkable set of field notes. The allistic subjects I have observed appear, on the surface, entirely functional. They hold jobs, maintain relationships, raise children. And yet their neurological profile diverges from the norm in ways that are at once fascinating and bewildering. March 11, 2089 The most immediately striking feature of the allistic profile is their relationship with information. Where a typical individual experiences the sharing of useful knowledge as a basic social reflex, the allistic subject appears to require an elaborate ritual before any information exchange can occur. Approach an allistic subject directly with a piece of useful data and observe what happens. Rather than receiving it, they freeze. A threat-assessment process appears to engage, entirely pre-consciously, before the content of the communication can be evaluated at all. One subject described it to me as feeling "strange" when a stranger approached with unsolicited information, though she could not articulate why. I have learned to preface all information exchanges with what my translator calls "the preamble ritual" — a sequence of social signals that appears to deactivate the threat response and allow communication to proceed. The exact form varies, but typically involves eye contact, a softening of posture, and verbal acknowledgment that one is about to speak. Only the

Tech Companies Regret Firing Engineers for AI: The Quiet Rehiring Nobody's Talking About [2026] Klarna's CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski stood on stage in 2024 and bragged that AI had replaced 700 customer service employees. The stock market loved it. LinkedIn influencers celebrated. And then, quietly, in 2025, Klarna started hiring humans again. That single reversal tells you everything about why tech companies regret firing engineers for AI. I've watched this pattern unfold across the industry, and a viral YouTube video by Pooja Dutt documenting these failures is now pulling over 10,000 views per day. The audience isn't just curious. They're vindicated. The tech industry laid off over 260,000 workers in 2023 alone, according to Layoffs.fyi , with many companies explicitly citing AI automation as justification. Now, in 2026, the bills are coming due. The companies that swung hardest at the "AI replaces engineers" thesis are the ones scrambling hardest to undo the damage. Why Did Companies Fire Engineers for AI in the First Place? The logic seemed airtight. AI can generate code faster than humans. AI can handle customer queries at scale. AI doesn't need benefits, PTO, or performance reviews. Executives saw a clean line from "AI generates output" to "we need fewer people," and they drew it with a Sharpie. I've been in enough executive planning meetings to know exactly how this plays out. Someone demos an AI tool that produces a working prototype in 20 minutes. The room gets excited. The CFO asks how many engineers they can cut. Nobody asks the harder question: what happens when that prototype needs to survive contact with production? The answer is that it breaks. Badly. Klarna is the poster child, but they're far from alone. Apple has spent two full years struggling with AI-driven improvements to Siri, despite being one of the most well-resourced engineering organizations on the planet. Even with virtually unlimited budget and talent, replacing deep engineering expertise

A story about knowledge extraction, Kafka consumer rebalance, and what happens when a company...

I got fired from my first job, took down a database server with a badly written query, and was...

I finished building my first portfolio. I want everyone to give their honest opinion on it. No need to hold back. waliimran.vercel.app Thanks you!

May 25, 2026. This is not just another date on my calendar. This marks the beginning of one of the biggest professional transitions of my life. After nearly a decade working in the world of IT infrastructure, technical support, networking, field engineering, and systems operations, I’ve made a decision that has been building in my mind for some time: I am transitioning into Data Analytics. And this is where I document that journey—publicly, honestly, and in real time. Not when I become an expert. Not when I feel “ready.” Not when everything looks polished. I’m starting now. Because real growth is rarely clean, predictable, or perfectly planned. Sometimes it starts with one uncomfortable decision: To leave what you already know… and step into what your future requires. Where My Journey Started Before data, before dashboards, before writing my first SQL query or building my first analytics project—my career started in the trenches of IT. For the past 10 years, I’ve built my career solving real technical problems across businesses, organizations, schools, offices, and field operations. My world has been cables, routers, networks, system failures, installations, troubleshooting, and making technology work where others saw complexity. Over the years, I’ve worked deeply in: Computer troubleshooting and hardware diagnostics Printer setup, configuration, and enterprise support Wi-Fi deployment and hotspot installations LAN design and structured network deployment Fiber optic installations and network termination Data cabling and structured cabling systems CCTV surveillance installation and maintenance Alarm systems and electronic security integration Intelligent security systems Electric fence installations and perimeter protection systems Router, switch, and access point configuration End-user support and enterprise technical troubleshooting Systems maintenance and operational support I’ve spent years on ladders, in server rooms, inside offices, on construction sites, insi

Data analysis is at the heart of how we spot patterns and improve systems today. Tools like Python, SQL, Power BI, and Tableau are everywhere in the data world, but Excel has held its ground as the starting point for anyone getting into data work, and there is a reason for that. What is Excel? Excel is a spreadsheet built on a grid of rows and columns. You use it to organize, format, and calculate data. For analysts it is where messy raw data gets sorted out, numbers get worked through, and everything gets turned into something that actually makes sense to look at. Ways Excel is Used in Real-World Data Analysis 1. Data Cleaning Raw data is almost never clean. Names are misspelled, IDs get duplicated, spacing is off, values go missing. None of that is unusual, it is just the reality of working with real data. Before any analysis happens the data has to be honest, because if the data is wrong the results will be too. Functions like PROPER() and TRIM() are some of the basic tools that help get data into a state where you can actually work with it. 2. Financial Reporting Every business, big or small, needs to know where the money is going. Excel makes that straightforward. SUM() adds up a range of numbers, AVERAGE() finds the mean, and once the calculations are done the data can be turned into charts and dashboards that tell the story of the business clearly. Not everyone in the room is an analyst, but everyone can read a chart. 3. Business Decision Making Clean data presented well becomes a decision making tool. What do customers want? What is working? What needs to change? Sorting figures from highest to lowest or filtering by region can take thousands of rows and turn them into something focused and answerable. That is really what data is for, helping people make better calls. Excel Features I Have Learned and How They Apply Three features that have stood out to me are conditional formatting, data validation, and cell referencing. Conditional formatting highlights ce