Today was my first day at k6.io! I’m happy to announce that I’ve joined as their newest Developer Advocate for Performance Testing. k6 is a company I’ve had my eye on for a while, even (or maybe especially) when I was working for a competitor, Tricentis Flood. I always admired k6’s stance on open source, their involvement with the developer community, and the slick web app that brings load testing into the hands of many developers and testers.

As a load tester, I try to be tool-agnostic. I have to admit, though, that I do have a strong bias towards opensource tools. I joined Flood because of their focus on tools I already loved like JMeter, Gatling, and Element (based on Puppeteer). (And Selenium, but it’s a stretch to say I love Selenium.) But these are tools I’ve used for years, most of them from even before I joined Flood. What kind of load tester would I be if I could only really talk about scripting in a handful of tools?

So I thought it was time for a change, and k6 was the first and only company on my list for a couple reasons:

• The free and open source tool k6, which recently crossed over to 10,000 stars on Github, is often touted as the developer’s load testing tool of choice.
• k6’s cloud offering integrates seamlessly with the OSS tool, and it adds some killer features like performance insights that add real value to teams wanting to scale their load tests.
• The k6 team is incredibly responsive to the needs of their community. Unlike most companies, where only marketing, sales, and customer support people talk to customers, k6 developers are active on GitHub, social media, and other blog sites. Everyone is passionate about what they’re building.
• Roles in testing are changing, and the lines between tester and developer are blurring. Developers who don’t test are going to become just as obsolete as testers who don’t develop. I see k6’s popularity among the developer crowd as a good opportunity for me to sharpen my coding skills.

So I had to see for myself whether k6 was actually as good as it seemed.

Luckily, it turns out that k6 has a tradition of a “Week of Testing”, where every new member of the k6 team, regardless of role, spends their first week putting the product through its paces. Every part of the whole k6 solution (Cloud and OSS tool) is fair game, and the goal of the Week of Testing is to present feedback to the team at the end of it, while the new member’s eyes are fresh. When they told me about it, they said “We want to see you learn the tool on your own to see what parts are difficult to figure out.” To which I responded, “Challenge accepted!”

I decided to not only give a presentation at the end, but also to video the process for posterity’s sake… and, let’s face it, to impress my new managers and coworkers with my dazzling work ethic.

Step 1: Get the company’s name right.

In the first video, I share the differences between k6 vs. k6 Cloud vs. Load Impact!