Last weekend, I wrote a more or less casual post on LinkedIn containing the ‘rules’ (it’s more of a list of terms and conditions, really) I set for myself when it comes to using AI. That post received some interesting comments that made me think and refine my thoughts on when (not) to use AI to support me in my work. Thank you to all of you who commented for doing so, and for showing me that there still is value in being active on LinkedIn in between all the AI-generated ‘content’. I really appreciate it. Now, AI and LLMs like ChatGPT or Claude can be very useful, that is, when used prudently. I think it is very important to be conscious and cautious when it comes to using AI, though, which is why I wrote that post. I wrote it mostly for myself, to structure my thoughts around AI, but also because I think it is important that others are at least conscious of what they’re doing and working with. That doesn’t mean you have to adhere to or even agree with my views and the way I use these tools, by the way. Different strokes for different folks. Because of the ephemeral nature of these LinkedIn posts, and the importance of the topic to me, I want to repeat the ‘rules’ (again, more of a T&C list) I wrote down here. This is the original, unchanged list from the post I wrote on February 15: I only use it to support me in completing tasks I understand. I need to be able to scrutinize the output the AI system produces and see if it is both sound and fit for the purpose I want to use it for. I never use it to explain to me something I don’t know yet or don’t understand enough. I have seen and read about too many hallucinations to trust them to teach me what I don’t understand. Instead, I use books, articles, and other content from authors and sources I do trust if I’m looking to learn something new. I never EVER use it for creative work. I don’t use AI-generated images anywhere, and all of my blogs, LinkedIn posts, comments, course material and other written text are 100% my own, warts and all. My views, my ideas, my voice. Interestingly, most of the comments were written in reaction to the first two bullet points at the time I wrote this blog post. I don’t know exactly why this is the case, it might be because the people who read it agree (which I doubt seeing the tsunami of AI-generated content that’s around these days), or maybe because there’s a bit of stigma around admitting to use AI for content generation. I don’t know. What I do know is that it is an important principle to me. I wrote about the reasons for that in an earlier blog post, so I won’t repeat myself here. Like so many terms and conditions, the list I wrote down in this post will probably evolve over time, but what will not change is me remaining very careful around where I use and where I don’t use AI to help me in my work. Especially now that the speed with which new developments in the AI space are presented to us and the claims around what it can and will do only get bigger, I think it is wise to remain cautious and look at these developments with a critical and very much human view.

This blog post is another one in the ‘writing things down to structure my thinking on where I want my career to go’ series. I will get back to writing technical and automation blog posts soon, but I need to finish my contract testing course first. One of the things I like to do most in life is traveling and seeing new places. Well, seeing new places, mostly, as the novelty of waiting, flying and staying in hotel rooms has definitely worn off by now. I am in the privileged position (really, that is what it is: I’m privileged, and I fully realize that) that I get to scratch this travel itch professionally on a regular basis these days. Over the last few years, I have been invited to contribute to meetups and conferences abroad, and I also get to run in-house training sessions with companies outside the Netherlands a couple of times per year. Most of this traveling takes place within Europe, but for the last three years, I have been able to travel outside of Europe once every year (South Africa in 2022, Canada in 2023 and the United States in 2024), and needless to say I have enjoyed those opportunities very much. To give you an idea of the amount of traveling I do: for 2025, I now have four work-related trips abroad scheduled, and I am pretty sure at least a few more will be added to that before the year ends (it’s only just February…). That might not be much travel by some people’s standards, but for me, it is. And it seems the number of opportunities I get for traveling increase year over year, to the point where I have to say ‘no’ to several of these opportunities. Say no? Why? I thought you just said you loved to travel? Yes, that’s true. I do love to travel. But I also love spending time at home with my family, and that comes first. Always. Now, my sons are getting older, and being away from home for a few days doesn’t put as much pressure on them and on my wife as it did a few years ago. Still, I always need to find a balance between spending time with them and spending time at work. I am away from home for work not just when I’m abroad. I run evening training sessions with clients here in the Netherlands on a regular basis, too, as well as training sessions in my evenings for clients in different time zones, mainly US-based clients. And all that adds up. I try to only be away from home one night per week, but often, it’s two. When I travel abroad, it’s even more than that. Again, I’m not complaining. Not at all. It is an absolute privilege to get to travel for work and get paid to do that, but I cannot do that indefinitely, and that’s why I have made a decision: With a few exceptions (more on those below), I am going to say ‘no’ to conferences abroad from now on. This is a tough decision for me to make, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need to do. Tough, because I have very fond memories of all the conferences and meetups abroad I have contributed to. My first one, Romanian Testing Conference in 2017. My first keynote abroad, UKStar in 2019. My first one outside of Europe, Targeting Quality in 2023. They were all amazing, because of the travel and sightseeing (when time allowed), but also because of all the people I have met at these conferences. Yet, I can meet at least some of these people at conferences here in the Netherlands, too. Test Automation Days, the TestNet events, the Dutch Testing Day and TestMass all provide a great opportunity for me to catch up with my network. Sometimes, international conferences come to the Netherlands, too, like AutomationSTAR this year. And then there are plenty of smaller meetups here in the Netherlands (and Belgium) where I can meet and catch up with people as well. Plus, the money. I am not going to be a hypocrite and say that money doesn’t play into this. For the reasons mentioned above, I have a limited number of opportunities to travel every year, and I prefer to spend those on in-house training sessions with clients abroad, simply because the pay is much better. Even when a conference compensates flights and hotel (as they should) and offer a speaker or workshop facilitator fee (a nice bonus), it will be significantly less of a payday than when I run a training session with a client. That’s not the fault of those conferences, not at all, especially when they’re compensating their speakers fairly, but this is simply a matter of numbers and budgets. At the moment, I have one, maybe two contributions to conferences abroad coming up, and I gave them my word, so I’ll be there. That’s the SAST 30-year anniversary conference in October, plus one other conference that I’m talking to but haven’t received a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from yet. Other than that, if conferences reach out to me, it’s likely to be a ‘no’ from now on, unless: the event pays a fee comparable to my rate for in-house training I can combine the event with paid in-house training (for example with a sponsor) it is a country or region I really, really want to visit, either for personal reasons or because I want to grow my professional network there I don’t see the first one happening soon, and the list of destinations for the third one is very short (Norway, Canada, New Zealand, that’s pretty much it), so unless we can arrange paid in-house training alongside the conference, the answer will be a ‘no’ from me. Will this reduce the number of travel opportunities for me? Maybe. Maybe not. Again, I see the number of requests I get for in-house training abroad growing, too, and if that dies down, it’ll be a sign for me that I’ll have to work harder to create those opportunities. For 2025, things are looking pretty good, with trips for training to Romania, North Macedonia and Denmark already scheduled, and several leads for more in the pipeline. And if the number of opportunities does go down, that’s fine, too. I’m happy to spend that time with family, working on other things, or riding my bike. And I’m sure there will be a few opportunities to speak at online meetups, events and webinars, too.

As is the case every year, 2025 is starting off relatively slowly. There’s not a lot of training courses to run yet, and since a few of the projects I worked on wrapped up in December, I find myself with a little bit of extra time and headspace on my hands. I actually enjoy these slower moments, because they give me some time to think about where my professional career is going, if I’m still happy with the direction it is going on, and what I would like to see changed. Last year, I quit doing full time projects as an individual contributor to development teams in favour of part-time consultancy work and more focus on my training services. 2024 has been a great year overall, and I would be happy to continue working in this way in 2025. However, as a thought experiment, I took some time to think about what it would take for me to go back to full time roles, or maybe (maybe!) even consider joining a company on a permanent basis. Please note that this post is not intended as an ‘I need a job!’ cry for help. My pipeline for 2025 is slowly but surely filling up, and again, I am very happy with the direction my career is going at the moment. However, I have learned that it never hurts to leave your options open, and even though I love the variety in my working days these days, I think I would enjoy working with one team, on one goal, for an extended amount of time, too, under the right conditions. If nothing else, this post might serve as a reference post to send to people and companies that reach out to me with a full time contract opportunity or even a permanent job opening. This is also not a list of requirements that is set in stone. As my views on what would make a great job change (and they will), I will update this post to reflect those views. So, to even consider joining a company on a full-time contract or even a permanent basis, there are basically three things I will and should consider: What does the job look like? What will I be doing on a day-to-day basis? What are the must-haves regarding terms and conditions? What are the nice to haves that would provide the icing on the cake for me? Let’s take a closer look at each of these things. What I look for in a job As I mentioned before, I am not looking for a job as an individual contributor to a development team. I have done that for many years, and it does not really give me the energy that it used to. On the other hand, I am definitely not looking for a hands-off, managerial kind of role, as I’d like to think I would make an atrocious manager. Plus, I simply enjoy being hands-on and writing code way too much to let that go. I would like to be responsible for designing and implementing the testing and automation strategy for a product I believe in. It would be a lead role, but, as mentioned, with plenty (as in daily) opportunities to get hands-on and contribute to the code. The work would have to be technically and mentally challenging enough to keep me motivated in the long term. Getting bored quickly is something I suffer from, which is the main driver behind only doing part-time projects and working on multiple different things in parallel right now. I don’t want to work for a consultancy and be ‘farmed out’ to their clients. I’ve done that pretty much my entire career, and if that’s what the job will look like, I’d rather keep working the way I’m working now. The must-haves There are (quite) a few things that are non-negotiable for me to even consider joining a company full time, no matter if it’s on a contract or a permanent basis. The pay must be excellent. Let’s not beat around the bush here: people work to make money. I do, too. I’m doing very well right now, and I don’t want that to change. The company should be output-focused, as in they don’t care when I work, how many hours I put in and where I work from, as long as the job gets done. I am sort of spoiled by my current way of working, I fully realise that, but I’ve grown to love the flexibility. By the way, please don’t read ‘flexible’ as ‘working willy-nilly’. Most work is not done in a vacuum, and you will have to coordinate with others. The key word here is ‘balance’. Collaboration should be part of the company culture. I enjoy working in pair programming and pair testing setups. What I do not like are pointless meetings, and that includes having Scrum ceremonies ‘just because’. The company should be a remote-first company. I don’t mind the occasional office day, but I value my time too much to spend hours per week on commuting. I’ve done that for years, and it is time I’ll never get back. The company should actively stimulate me contributing to conferences and meetups. Public speaking is an important part of my career at the moment, and I get a lot of value from it. I don’t want to give that up. There should be plenty of opportunities for teaching others. This is what I do for a living right now, I really enjoy it, and I’d like to think I’m pretty good at it, too. Just like with the public speaking, I don’t want to give that up. This teaching can take many forms, though. Running workshops and regular pairing with others are just two examples. The job should scratch my travel itch. I travel abroad for work on average about 5-6 times per year these days, and I would like to keep doing that, as I get a lot of energy from seeing different places and meeting people. Please note that ‘traveling’ and ‘commuting’ are two completely different things. Yes, I realize this is quite a long list, but I really enjoy my career at the moment, and there are a lot of aspects to it that I’m not ready to give up. The nice to haves There are also some things that are not strictly necessary, but would be very nice to have in a job or full time contract: The opportunity to continue working on side gigs. I have a few returning customers that I’ve been working with for years, and I would really appreciate the opportunity to continue doing that. I realise that I would have to give up some things, but there are a few clients that I would really like to keep working with. By the way, this is only a nice to have for permanent jobs. For contracting gigs, it is a must-have. It would be very nice if the technology stack that the company is using is based on C#. I’ve been doing quite a bit of work in this stack over the years and I would like to go even deeper. If the travel itch I mentioned under the must-haves could be scratched with regular travel to Canada, Norway or South Africa, three of my favourite destinations in the world, that would be a very big plus. I realize that the list of requirements above is a long one. I don’t think there is a single job out there that ticks all the boxes. But, again, I really like what I’m doing at the moment, and most of the boxes are ticked at the moment. I would absolutely consider going full time with a client or even an employer, but I want it to be a step forward, not a step back. After all, this is mostly a thought experiment at the moment, and until that perfect contract or job comes along, I’ll happily continue what I’m doing right now.

As a (sort of) follow-up post to my yearly review for 2024, in this post, I would like to go over the changes, bug fixes and new features that have been introduced in RestAssured .NET in 2024. This year, I released 7 new versions of the library, and while none of the versions included changes that were worthy of a blog post on its own, I thought it would be a good idea to wrap them all up in a single overview. Basically, this blog post is an extended version of the library’s CHANGELOG. I’ll go through the new versions chronologically, starting with the first release of 2024. Version 4.2.2 - released April 23 RestAssured .NET 4.2.2 fixes a bug that prevented JSON responses that are an array to be properly verified. In other words, if the JSON response body looks like this: [ { "id": 1, "text": "Do the dishes" }, { "id": 2, "text": "Clean out the trash" }, { "id": 3, "text": "Read the newspaper" } ] I would expect this test to pass: [Test] public void JsonArrayResponseBodyElementCanBeVerifiedUsingNHamcrestMatcher() { Given() .When() .Get("http://localhost:9876/json-array-response-body") .Then() .StatusCode(200) .Body("$[1].text", NHamcrest.Is.EqualTo("Clean out the trash")); } but prior to this version, it threw a Newtonsoft.Json.JsonReaderException. The solution? Adding a try-catch that first tries to parse the JSON response as a JObject (equal to existing behaviour), catch the JsonReaderException and try again, now parsing the JSON response into a JArray. That made the newly added test pass without failing any other tests. Another demonstration of the added value of having a decent set of tests. RestAssured .NET is slowly growing and becoming more complex, and having a test suite I can run locally, and that always runs when I push code to GitHub is an invaluable safety net for me. These tests run in a few seconds, yet they give me invaluable feedback on the effect of new features, bug fixes and code refactoring efforts. I haven’t heard back from the person submitting the original issue, but I assume that this fixed their issue. Version 4.3.0 - released August 16 I love learning about how people use RestAssured .NET, because invariably they will use it in ways I haven’t foreseen. I was unfamiliar with the concept of server-sent events (SSE) in APIs, for example, yet there are people looking to test these kinds of APIs using RestAssured .NET. It turned out that what this user was looking for was a way to set the HttpCompletionOption value on the System.Net.Http.HttpClient that is wrapped by RestAssured .NET. To enable this, I added a method to the DSL that looks like this: Given() .UseHttpCompletionOption(HttpCompletionOption.ResponseHeadersRead) I also added the option to specify the HttpCompletionOption to be used in a RequestSpecification as well as in the global config. A straightforward fix that solved the problem for this specific user. The only thing I don’t like here is that I don’t know of a way to test this locally. Do you? I would love to hear it. Version 4.3.1 - release August 22 Another user pointed out to me that trying to verify that the value of a JSON response body element is an empty array also threw an exception. So, if the JSON response body looks like this: { "success": true, "errors": [] } this test should pass, but instead it threw a Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializationException: [Test] public void JsonResponseBodyElementEmptyArrayValueCanBeVerifiedUsingNHamcrestMatcher() { Given() .When() .Get("http://localhost:9876/json-empty-array-response-body") .Then() .StatusCode(200) .Body("$.errors", NHamcrest.Is.OfLength(0)); } The fix? Adding some code that checks if the element returned when evaluating the JsonPath expression is a JArray or a JObject and using the right matching logic accordingly. I used my preferred procedure here: first, write a failing test that reproduces the issue then, make the test pass without breaking any other tests refactor the code, document and release Does this procedure sound familiar to you? Version 4.4.0 - released October 21 As you can probably tell from the semantic versioning, this version introduced a new feature to RestAssured .NET: the ability to use NTLM authentication when making an HTTP call. To enable this, I added a new method to the DSL: Given() .NtlmAuth() // This one uses default NTLM credentials for the current user .NtlmAuth("username", "password", "domain") // This one uses custom NTLM credentials As I had no idea how to write a proper test for this, even though I had tested it before releasing using Fiddler, I released a beta version first that the person submitting the issue could use to verify the solution. I’m happy to say that it worked for them and that the solution could be released properly. Again, if someone can think of a way to add a proper test for NTLM authentication to the test suite, I would love to hear it. All that the current tests do is run the code and see if no exception is thrown. Not a good test, but until I find a better way, it will have to do. Version 4.5.0 - released November 19 This version introduced not one, but two changes. First, since .NET 9 was officially released earlier that week (or maybe the week before, I forgot), I needed to release a RestAssured .NET version that targets .NET 9, so I did. Just like with .NET 8, I didn’t really have to change anything to the code other than adding net9.0 to the TargetFrameworks and add .NET 9 to the build pipeline for the library to make sure that every change is tested on .NET 9, too. Happy to say it all ‘just worked’. The other change took more effort: a user reported that they could not override the ResponseLogLevel set in a RequestSpecification at the individual test level. The reason? In the existing code, the response was logged directly after the HTTP call completed, so before any calls to Log() for the response. When Log() is called on the response, it was then logged again. I have no idea how I completely overlooked this until now, but I did. Rewriting the code to make this work took longer than I expected, but I managed in the end, through quite a bit of trial and error and lots of humand-centered testing (again, no idea how to write automated tests for this). The logging functionality of RestAssured .NET is something I intend to rewrite in the future, for a couple of reasons: It’s impossible to write automated tests for it (or at least I don’t know how to do this) Ideally, I want the logging to be more configurable and extensible to give users more flexibility than they have at the moment Version 4.5.1 - released November 20 As one does, I found an issue with the updated logging logic almost immediately after releasing 4.5.0 to the public: masking of sensitive headers and cookies didn’t work anymore when specified as part of a RequestSpecification. Lucky for me, this was a quick fix, but a bit embarrassing nonetheless. Had I had proper automated tests for the logging in place, I probably would have caught this before releasing 4.5.0…. Anyway, it’s fixed now, as far as I can tell. Version 4.6.0 - released December 9 The final RestAssured .NET release of 2024 added the capability to strip the ; charset=<some_charset> from the Content-Type header in a request. It turns out, some APIs explicitly expect this header to not contain the charset suffix, but the way I create a request, or rather, the way .NET creates a StringContent object, will add it by default. This issue was a great example of one of the main reasons why I started this project: there is so much I don’t know yet about HTTP, APIs, C#/.NET and other technologies, and working on these issues and improving RestAssured .NET gives me an opportunity to learn them. I make a habit of writing what I learned down in the issue on GitHub, so I can review it later, and so I can point others to these links and thoughts, too. So, if you’re looking for a way to strip the charset identifier from the Content-Type header in the request, you can now do that by passing an optional second boolean argument to Body() (defaults to false): Given() .Body(your_body_goes_here, stripCharset: true) That’s it! As you can see, lots of small changes, bug fixes and new features have been added to RestAssured .NET this year. Oh, and before I forget: with every release, I also made sure to update the dependencies I use to create and test RestAssured .NET to their latest versions. I consider that good housekeeping, and it’s all part of keeping a library up to date. I am looking forward to seeing the library evolve and improve further in 2025.