My journey from manual QA to SDET — what actually made the difference

Three years ago I was doing entirely manual testing — exploratory testing, test case execution in Jira, bug reports. Today I'm a full-time SDET writing Playwright tests, building CI pipelines, and contributing to test framework architecture. A few things that genuinely accelerated the transition: **1. Pick one automation tool and go deep** I wasted 6 months dabbling in Selenium, then Cypress, then Playwright. When I committed to just Playwright, my skills compounded fast. **2. Learn enough Python/JS to debug, not just write tests** Being able to read error traces, understand async behaviour, and debug fixture scope issues was more valuable than learning new tools. **3. Contribute to the CI pipeline** Offering to help set up GitHub Actions for the test suite gave me huge exposure to DevOps concepts and made me much more valuable to the team. Curious to hear others' experiences — what was the turning point for you?