I'm a QA automation engineer living in Amsterdam. My job is making sure software works before real people find out it doesn't. In practice that means writing a lot of code: end-to-end and API test suites in Playwright and Cypress, almost always in TypeScript, wired into CI so the team hears about problems from a pipeline instead of a customer.
Things I've learned to care about over the years: choosing what not to test, keeping suites fast enough that nobody is tempted to skip them, and writing failure messages a tired human can act on.
On AI: I use it every day, both to write code and inside the things I build. It has made producing code cheap, and that quietly made verifying it the expensive part. I think that moves QA closer to the center of the work, not further from it. Testing AI features themselves, where the output is never the same twice, is some of the most interesting test design I've gotten to do.
Day to day: TypeScript · React · Next.js · Node.js · Playwright · Cypress · Jest · Vitest · Prisma · PostgreSQL · Docker
Also in the toolbox: JavaScript · Java · SQL · Angular · Kubernetes · GitHub Actions