The “#1 Cypress Ambassador” Is Now Open to Finding Playwright Jobs

If you’re a Cypress tester, you might also want to consider an exit strategy. But I do not recommend Playwright; read on.

Many Cypress testers heard of Filip Hric, who is quite active (mostly promoting and teaching) in the Cypress community. He was featured first on the Cypress Ambassador page.

The first ‘Ambassador” shown on https://www.cypress.io/ambassadors, as of 2024–08–07

Long-time readers know that I rarely mention individuals by name in my articles (over 500 to date). Why? Real test automation engineers are extremely rare (even at FAANG), we can’t have high expectations. I don’t know Filip Hric at all, the main rival of Cypress is Playwright, which I don’t use anyway (I use raw Selenium WebDrivber + RSpec, pure free, open-source frameworks). If there is something I am against, it is the notorious “Cypress Ambassador”. 

The simple reason I quote the name in this article: being an ambassador means publicly promoting something, which naturally makes one subject to public scrutiny. In this article, I simply listed several of his posts and comments and made a logical analyse. 

(update: 2024-12-20)

Quitting the “Cypress Ambassador”, which has become a shameful label. A smart move, though. However, it was a mistake not to criticize the Cypress Ambassador program. Shouldn't he apologize for misleading some inexperienced and naive automated testers down the wrong path with his publications?

Filip Hric is also a TAU instructor with three Cypress courses, claimed “international keynote speaker”.

https://testautomationu.applitools.com/instructors/filip_hric.html

Calling Filip Hric “#1 Cypress Ambassador” is well justified.

I don’t know Filip Hric personally; we never exchanged words. Though our names appeared together in Test Guild’s episode “Cypress Dying, AI Generative Journey Creator, and More.”

This post is obviously biased, as it did not even link my article. Readers, don’t blindly believe those newsletters (they are living on sponsors/ads)

Filip Hric’s response to the Reddit post, “Cypress.io is about to die, you should migrate your projects”, about 1 year ago. Now, he seems open to taking on Playwright (see below). In fact, if responses of this tweet overall supported the reddit post author, note, that was one year ago.

I recently noticed Filip Hric because he reposted an obviously wrong article by Gleb Bahmutov, which led to wide criticism from others. The good outcome is that David Burns, Chair of the Browser Testing and Tools Working Group (W3C), wrote an excellent response article, “Flakiness isn’t from your test framework”. This should put an end to evil mudslingings against the great Selenium WebDriver all those years.

After seeing David Burns’ article and other comments, Filip Hric quickly updated the post with a sort of apology.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7193270830271762432/

Frankly, I was impressed and had some respect for Filip Hric, despite his work on the wrong technology: Cypress, which has been hurting the reputation of Web Test Automation (every single Cypress test automation I witnessed was a complete failure. From a few I was asked to rescue, I did it at typically 30X — 50X productivity using Raw Selenium WebDriver + RSpec. People were so surprised and found raw Selenium is so easy and so much better than broken Cypress).

Don’t confuse E2E Test Automation Success with being able to creating a handful of E2E tests, which QTP accomplished the task quite well over 20 years ago. Check out the Definition of End-to-End Test Automation Success.
For inpatient readers, Test Creation Only Accounts for ~10% of Web Test Automation Efforts

QA Engineers, Stay Out of Cypress Component Testing, for Your Own Sake!

Recently, Filip Hric’s LinkedIn profile status was changed to “OPENTOWORK.”