The skill of testing skills

The most dangerous pull request in your company might contain zero lines of code. It's late, and the last PR waiting for review contains a handful of markdown files, part of some skills and rules in your IDE. This huge pile of nearly unreviewable text... How do you even know whether this change badly hurts the team's workflow?

Skills are becoming the new R&D workhorse, yet the science of testing them remains vague. Drawing from production systems, we'll explore state-of-the-art techniques for testing and improving skills: spec linting, activation rates, outcome verification, several TypeScript-based evaluation frameworks, including some that specialize in skills, seven types of fundamental judges, and a handful of practical best practices for building high confidence in agent skills (exemplified with JavaScript code)

💎 The art of backend component tests

As the testing diamond and component/integration tests become the new gold standard, the knowledge about writing them efficiently is still rare and often scattered. From the get-go, a developer is thrown into scary decisions like 'Should I clean data between tests?' and 'How should I mock remote APIs?'. Looking at traditional literature won't yield any relevant answers. This talk dives into the beauty and power of component tests when done right.

Our journey will go through the key areas of component testing, touching on topics like dealing with data(base), interactions with external services, testing message queues, error handling and readiness scenarios (did the process exit when it should?!), and ensuring OpenAPI integrity

Don't like theoretical talks? Great, because 90% of our time will get spent with real-world testing scenarios and popular libraries. This talk is inspired by my GitHub testing best practices series, boasting almost 130,000 stars.

- This is my flagship talk, which I'm keen to improve constantly

- Not your typical 'yada yada TDD testing talk'—this dives into the new world of testing APIs with component and integration tests

- The insights shared are extracted from dozens of consultation engagements with giant companies

Go Deep Inside the Harness → Make Better Decisions

Your team is in a meeting room, AI coding decisions on the table. Someone says: "A reviewer sub-agent can chat back and forth with the main agent." "The deny list blocks bash scripts deterministically." "Few hierarchical skills beat lots of short ones." True? False? Most people aren't sure. The real answer is: it's complicated - and that complexity shapes the decisions you make. These questions have real answers, and the answers live inside the harness. This talk is a seriously deep journey into how your harness works - Claude Code, Cursor, whatever you run. Once you see it, the black box turns to glass - and every decision you make gets sharper. Love code-level talks? This one is for you

Workshop: Node.js testing, beyond the basics

Welcome to a workshop that is all about advanced real-world testing challenges that everyone often meets. This is certainly not your typical 'hello-world' testing, we assume that you already have some testing experience and are eager to practice the next level. Expect deep conversations on topics like testing with DB, seeding and cleaning data, testing HTTP interactions, multiple contract testing techniques, testing with message queues, and more. When it's time to practice with code, we will play the 'five islands' game where your PRs reveal the secret code to the big treasure. It's my hope that it's going to be not only insightful but also fun

Holding testing workshops is my craft and passion. I'm holding this content for a handful of organizations every year and keep enhancing the content every month for years. Every slide and code example were re-written 3 times already to make this more insightful and engaging