Joshua Pendragon

I was listening to the developers who test blog and the message that “You should try to put out content when you have something to share” resonated strongly.

I’ll preface by saying that I’ve been in the job market for about 3 months now. The experience has not been fun, per-se, but there have been some good parts. Expanding my network, getting my portfolio and career artifacts (like this website) put together and organized and polished enough to show people have all been beneficial in various ways. I’ve managed to accrue some decent experience in some languages other than Typescript (mostly Go, Rust, and Java), and re-learn how to have healthier work-life balance.

Much of these benefits came directly or indirectly from leveraging excellent online resources, so I’ll take some time in this post to talk about them, how I used them, and how they might be helpful to others. Nothing is sponsored and YMMV.

First off: Pathrise.

Pathrise (link)

Pathrise is a mentorship and placement service, halfway between a bootcamp and a staffing firm on steroids. You can sign up for their service to:

• Gain access to their mentor network. They have mentors that are industry agnostic for things such as Job Hunting and mindset coaching, as well as industry-specific mentors (I was interested in their Software Engineers)
• Articles, webinars, and other materials.

I found Pathrise through one of the Facebook eavesdropping adds. Clearly, FB was listening in when my manager broke the news to me and wasted no time in its targeted advertisements.

Test Automation University (link)

Test Automation University is a free resource for learning about test automation. They have courses on Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, and other tools. I’ve taken a few courses on Playwright and Cypress previously, and I’ve found them to be very helpful. I also used them as onboarding material for new test automation team members, particularly the testing fundamentals and playwright intro courses. The courses are taught by industry professionals and are (generally) very well put together.

I’ve found the courses to be very helpful in learning about the tools and how to use them. You also get certificates for courses and tracks that you complete. It may not have the gravitas of an ISTQB cert, but it’s a good way to show that you’re learning and growing.

Online Test Websites EG: (the-internet.heroku) (demoqa)

It’s well and good to learn how to use a tool, but you need to practice using it. These websites are great for that. They give you a variety of different web elements to interact with, and you can use them to practice writing tests. I’ve used them to practice writing tests for things like login forms, tables, and other web elements.