My Journey from Test Automation to Full-Stack Development
Published on August 5, 2025
The Foundation: A Mindset for Quality
My career in tech didn't start with building applications, but with trying to break them. As an Automation Engineer at Cognizant, my world revolved around C#, .NET, and the rigorous logic of ensuring software quality for a major US healthcare client. This role taught me something invaluable: how to think from the user's perspective and how to build systems that are robust and reliable.
I spent my days writing scripts that would simulate user interactions, catch bugs before they reached production, and ultimately, guarantee a stable product. While I was building testing frameworks, I found myself increasingly fascinated by the application architecture itself. I wanted to be on the other side—not just testing the system, but creating it.
The Spark: Discovering the MERN Stack
That curiosity led me down a rabbit hole of self-learning. I started with the fundamentals: JavaScript. Its asynchronous nature and vibrant ecosystem were a world away from the structured environment of C#, but I was hooked.
From there, I discovered the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React, Node.js). It felt like the perfect toolkit for the modern web.
- React allowed me to build the kind of dynamic, interactive user interfaces I had once been tasked with testing.
- Node.js and Express opened up the world of server-side logic, letting me build the APIs that power those interfaces.
- MongoDB provided a flexible and intuitive way to think about and store data.
Every tutorial I completed and every small project I built solidified my decision. This was the path I wanted to take.
The Transition: Building, Learning, and Growing
The transition wasn't overnight. It was a process of late nights, countless GitHub commits, and a relentless drive to solve problems. I built projects like the Xenzy Thrift Store and the Yoga Teacher Platform not just to learn, but to prove to myself that I could apply these new skills to real-world scenarios.
My background in automation gave me a unique advantage. I approached my code with a built-in focus on quality, edge cases, and scalability. I wasn't just writing code that worked; I was writing code that was built to last.
Today, I'm a Full-Stack Developer who is passionate about building high-performance, user-centric applications. My journey from automation has given me a unique perspective, and I'm excited to continue building, learning, and creating on the web.