We are excited to introduce Jaswanth Manigundan to the k6 community and have him as one of our k6 Champions! I met Jas through the Ministry of Testing community, where he actively shares his learnings about testing and quality practices.
Jas is a familiar face at various testing conferences and has spoken at events such as Automation Guild, TestBash, and TestFlix. Check out his events page to watch his talks, podcasts, and other events.
Now, let's get to know him a bit more!
Tell us a little bit about yourself
I’m Jas from Melbourne. I’m originally from India, but I moved to Australia for my master's in Software Engineering at the University of Melbourne and eventually got settled in Melbourne. I started my career as a mobile application developer specialising in Android. I worked for over six years as a developer in a wide range of technology stacks. A few years ago, I changed my focus to becoming an automation engineer. Since focusing on writing better tests as a developer, my interest in testing and quality increased, and I decided to change roles.
Since then, I’ve worked as an automation engineer in mobile and web applications. Over the last two years since I joined Culture Amp, I got to work with a wonderful team focusing more on Quality Coaching. As part of the team, I focus on tech Quality Coaching by helping various product teams deal with quality-related challenges, coaching them, and building tools that would make testing easier across the stack.
What do you do outside of work?
I enjoy public speaking and have spoken at a few conferences over the last three years. It has been a great experience, primarily a learning experience. I also play Indian classical music a lot, which I’ve been learning since I was a 5-year-old. I’m now looking forward to rejuvenating my musical journey.
What made you decide to become a k6 Champion?
I stumbled across k6 only recently (a couple of years ago). I was surprised to learn about such a code-friendly performance testing tool that is open-source and powerful in so many ways. But I felt others in the community shouldn’t deal with the lack of information about k6. So I started to speak about it in my talks. I started organically speaking about k6 on how I use it daily and introduced it to others as an option for their performance testing needs. Finally, when the k6 champion program officially launched, it felt very organic to be a part of it, given how close I am to it.
How are you currently helping the k6 community?
My primary contribution to the community is sharing my experience as I work on it daily. It has already helped many people know about the tool and inspired them to try it out.
But also, on top of that, I’ve added some additional functionality to k6 extensions, and I’m looking forward to making them open-source.
What do you love about k6?
There are two aspects that I love about k6.
- Seamless experience - The simplicity of k6 as a tool is a very understated quality. Getting started and having a fully-blown suite of performance tests is very straightforward. Moreover, to have a code-driven tool that can be maintained very well, in the long run, has been a game changer.
- Performance - The amount of load that k6 can generate, even in your local development machine, can be humongous. In general, k6 can generate approximately 10,000 requests per second. It is quite similar for messaging systems if you use the xk6-kafka extension.
What's your most favourite k6 feature?
I’ve been working on kafka and asynchronous systems a lot and xk6-kafka has been a significant extension. The k6 extensions ecosystem is a feature that I like. It gives the flexibility to choose from various extensions or write our own.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to become a k6 Champion?
My advice for someone wanting to become a k6 champion is to actively share their experience with k6 with the community. It not only helps others to learn from your experience, but it also allows you to gain a lot of insights by enabling others to provide feedback on it or have curious people question you about a few things. It’s how I’ve managed to get feedback from the community.
About the k6 Champions Program
The k6 Champions Program aims to recognise performance testing experts within our community from across the globe and amplify their contributions. To learn more about this program, check out our launch blog post or visit our official k6 Champions Program landing page.