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It has been more than two years since I became a Cypress Ambassador, and within that time I gained a lot of experience, a new professional support network, and ultimately, a way to become more active in the testing community. The time has come for me to venture out to new opportunities, but before doing that I want to summarise my overall ambassador program experience to share how being an ambassador has helped me and the community.
2020 - The Year When It Started
In January 2020, I came about the Cypress Ambassador Program. I had been using Cypress for a couple of years and also began speaking at internal meet ups to introduce people to what Cypress is. During the late half of 2019, I started writing my personal blog with some of my posts centred on how to use Cypress.
With all these experiences, I decided to apply to the program (out of the blue) without thinking that I would get accepted. A month later, I received a confirmation email from the Cypress team that I’ve made it into their program!
Being part of the Cypress Ambassador Program, I was able to network with new people who were also using Cypress as part of their day-to-day jobs. One of the people that I connected with was Giridhar Rajkumar, and he asked me to become the co-organiser of the Cypress UK community group. Fast forward to today, we have built a community with over 1000 members and have hosted speakers from around the world to share their wealth of experience about Cypress.
Cypress Content
Another way I’ve contributed to the community as a Cypress Ambassador is through my blog posts. While I also blog about other testing tools, my posts on how to use Cypress have been proven useful to the community, showing how Cypress has become popular to use for test automation.
Here are some of the blog posts that I have written:
I have been able to collaborate with other companies such as Applitools, LambdaTest, TechBeacon and TestGuild (Joe Colantonio) to provide insights on how I’ve used Cypress in my work projects and also how Cypress can help with accessibility and performance testing via their plugins.
Most of my content are beginner friendly with my latest video collaboration (LambdaTest) showing how you can run Cypress tests in headless mode.
Meetups and Conferences
During my time as a Cypress Ambassador, I was also able to share my learnings with the community via various meetups and tech conferences. At one point, I was doing weekly lunch-and-learn sessions about different topics related to Cypress with topics ranging from API testing, visual testing, and how to run your Cypress tests on a CI/CD pipeline, just to name a few.
I was also given the opportunity to host workshops (virtual and in-person) to show to beginners how they can start to use Cypress.
Online Courses
Finally, I was able to share two online courses with the community. My first online course was from Test Automation University, with a course centred around test automation for accessibility. One of the chapters introduced the use of cypress-axe and how it can be used to catch basic accessibility violations.
My next course, from Ministry of Testing, introduces why test automation is important, including how Cypress can help with their testing needs and how to write their first Cypress test.
Moving On to New Opportunities
Looking back, I am very thankful that I have experienced being a Cypress Ambassador but it's now time for me step down. It has opened up many doors for me in terms of new opportunities and I’ve met a lot of supportive people along the way.
Being a Cypress Ambassador has allowed me to experience being a developer and testing advocate which has led me to try developer advocacy for my next full time role that I will start very soon!
I’m genuinely excited that the number of Cypress Ambassadors are growing and helping out the community in different forms so if you are a big fan of Cypress and you are interested to apply, please click this link, Cypress Ambassadors, for more information.
Well... let me tell you that your posts and tips on Cypress have been very helpful all this time. I started working with Cypress about 4 or 5 years ago, and your content has filled my bucket with creative ways to do stuff taking advantage of the flexibility Cypress provides for us to innovate... Thanks for the adventure! and the best of lucks for your future projects! (if you don't mind, I'll stick around just to check what new exciting stuff you start sharing... 😉 )