Performance testing is one of those skills many engineers think they understand.
Until production says otherwise.
Over the years, I kept seeing the same pattern:
- Load test reports showing "PASSED"
- Average response time within limits
- Zero errors during the test
- And then… production incidents
The problem wasn’t tools.
The problem was understanding.
The gap I keep noticing
When I looked at available learning materials, I saw a few common issues.
1️⃣ Outdated content disguised as "updated"
Some courses are technically refreshed — new thumbnail, new title, small edits.
But then you open the video and see a MS Word document on the screen for 15 minutes while the instructor reads text aloud.
Performance testing is practical.
It requires scenarios, metrics interpretation, trade-offs, and production context.
Not just theory.
2️⃣ Too tool-focused
A lot of courses focus heavily on:
"Here’s how to use Tool X."
Buttons. Config fields. How to run a test.
But very little about:
- How to design a meaningful workload model
- How to connect performance metrics to real user experience
- How to interpret test results correctly
- How to prevent false confidence from "green" reports
Tools change.
Principles don’t.
If you only learn the tool, you’re limited.
If you understand performance engineering thinking, you can use any tool.
3️⃣ Limited structured material
Performance testing isn’t as popular as automation testing or manual testing.
Finding structured, end-to-end material is surprisingly hard.
You’ll find:
- Blog posts
- Isolated tutorials
- Tool documentation
But rarely a complete path from fundamentals → metrics → workload modeling → test executions → result analysis → reporting.
The turning point
After multiple production-related discussions and post-incident analyses, I realized something:
Many teams don’t fail because they don’t run load tests.
They fail because they don’t know how to think about performance correctly.
That’s when the idea started forming — not to create “another tool course,” but to structure performance testing the way I believe it should be taught:
- Start with core principles and the real purpose of performance testing in modern systems
- Explain why performance testing matters for business, not just for engineering
- Break down different types of performance tests and when to use each of them
- Dive deep into performance metrics and how to analyze results correctly
- Show how to choose the right tools instead of blindly following trends
- Demonstrate how to design and execute practical tests using JMeter and BlazeMeter
- Build a simple but complete performance testing setup with JMeter, InfluxDB, and Grafana
- Teach how to communicate results clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
What it actually took
It took around 3 months to create — evenings and weekends after my main job.
The hardest part wasn’t just recording the videos.
It was everything around it.
I had to figure out recording tools, experiment with setups, and learn how to make the content look and sound professional. The first versions didn’t even pass the platform’s quality review because the audio wasn’t good enough. I had to invest in a proper microphone, re-record several lessons, adjust sound settings, and rethink the whole setup.
Good audio matters more than most people expect.
And while solving the technical side of recording, I was also trying to solve a different challenge — how to simplify complex topics without oversimplifying them.
Performance testing sits at the intersection of infrastructure, backend architecture, system design, monitoring, and even statistics. Turning that into something structured, practical, and clear required a lot of iteration — reorganizing sections, refining explanations, replacing vague theory with concrete examples.
Recording was just the visible part.
The real work was making sure the content was both accurate and understandable.
Why I’m sharing this
Not as an announcement.
But because performance testing deserves more attention.
If you work in QA or backend engineering and you’ve ever seen:
"Average response time looks fine"
"It passed in staging"
"We didn’t see that coming"
Then you already know why this topic matters.
I decided to organize my experience into a structured course. If you're curious, you can find it here:
👉 Performance Testing Fundamentals: From Basics to Hands-On (Udemy)
Either way — I hope more engineers move beyond just running tests and start truly understanding performance.
Because that’s where the real difference is made.
Why I’m Writing About This on Dev.to
I’m not here just to publish a one-time announcement.
My goal is to regularly share practical, sometimes uncomfortable topics related to performance testing.
Performance testing is still a niche area compared to automation or backend/frontend development. But when systems fail, performance is often at the center of the problem.
Through Dev.to, I want to:
- Break down real-world performance issues
- Explain concepts in a practical way
- Share lessons learned from production discussions
- Encourage deeper thinking beyond just “running a tool”
If performance engineering is relevant to your work, you’ll see more content here focused on fundamentals, interpretation, and real system behavior.
Because the industry doesn’t need more button-click tutorials.
It needs better performance thinking.
Top comments (1)
Really cool to see the behind-the-scenes story, so much work goes into a course that most people never notice.