Welcome back to our Ambassador Spotlight series! Here, we celebrate the incredible individuals within the Cypress community who go above and beyond, sharing their expertise through insightful blogs, engaging talks, and everyday support. Discover more about our Ambassador program here.
This week, we introduce Marcelo Costa, a dedicated QA Automation Engineer and mentor known for tackling real-world testing challenges and sharing those solutions with the world. Join us as we explore what inspired Marcelo to become an Ambassador and uncover his top tips for improving your own testing practice.
What motivates you to be a Cypress Ambassador?
I'm happy to share and give back to the Cypress community the experience I've gathered over the years. If I use Cypress, it's because of its active community and engagement, and I'm more than happy to share what I know.
How do you currently help others that are either using Cypress or interested in using Cypress?
Answering Reddit questions or Telegram groups. I also create articles that help others use Cypress, including posts about Cypress global hooks, how to get most out of cy.prompt(), validating Excel content using Cypress, and more. You can read them on Dev.to.
What is your favorite Cypress feature?
For me, cy.intercept is a game changer. It can validate a request, modify it, or even completely mock it for a specific purpose with just a few lines of code. Additionally, adding aliases and combining them with cy.wait to ensure the request has gone through before proceeding with frontend validation makes everything much more efficient.
What is your favorite "Cypress Best Practice" and why?
There are many! But using cy.session combined with the cacheAcrossSpecs option set to true to share my login not just within a single spec but across all of them really made me happy back in the day.
Outside of work, what are your favorite things to do (hobbies, passions, etc.)?
In my free time, I love watching movies, learning languages, swimming, listening to music from my vinyl collection, traveling to foreign countries, and discovering new places to eat.
What is one professional milestone you are proud of?
Being told by my former Tech Lead that I was, beyond a doubt, the best automation tester he knew, that I was writing tests far better than any senior developer on the team, and that I achieved all of this after starting with a completely new tech stack was incredibly rewarding.
For new users - what is the best way to "get started" with Cypress?
There are many ways to learn, but one thing I always say is: feel free to learn in the way you enjoy the most. Whether it's reading the official documentation, watching examples on YouTube, getting together with a senior, or starting a project on your own and thinking, "I want to automate this by doing XYZ"—just do it. Don't be afraid to fail. The best way to learn is to practice, always.
What is your favorite quote or saying?
A day without learning something new is a lost day!