My session at WPC 2022

Yesterday I was at WPC 2022, “the most important Italian conference on Microsoft technologies”, where I presented a one-hour session titled “Reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps with Microsoft Playwright.”

Attendance was great and there was a lot of excitement up in the air; it was evident that people were happy to meet and interact in person again. After the forced two years hiatus, it was great to be back at a big on-site conference, let alone speak at it. I delivered my talk to a packed-full room of nodding, smiling and questioning attendees, which felt fantastic.

I think I’m satisfied with my delivery, although I managed to screw up a few things, most notably showing my Twitter password live (that was a funny moment)¹. I also forgot to mention a couple of things.

• I demoed CLI usage on Bash, but the kind people working on Playwright also provide full Powershell support; the website defaults to Powershell for their demo scripts;
• I never mentioned the obvious: as you’re testing your front-end application with Playwright, you’re actually performing a complete end-to-end test involving your backend. There is great value in end-to-end testing. Several times we caught subtle things that weren’t a direct front-end issue but more the result of the interaction with the backend. And yes (thanks to the guy who asked), your testing environment must support the whole stack.

The slide deck contains most of the code and bash commands I demoed live on stage. It’s nothing too original; I reproduced the examples on the official website with a few variations and additions.

I had fun performing again in front of a real, live crowd. Perhaps the induced break, unexpected and undesirable for many reasons, did me good.