Living my version of the "a bug's life" movie...

Guess Who’s Back, Back Again :p Welllll, today I want to talk about my journey with Locust.

Before I start, I do want to mention something important: this is my opinion, based on my experience. Till this day, I would never call myself a guru in anything. At b.ignited we like to call it being a “jack of all trades.” I absolutely love learning new things, but doing a super deep dive into one topic is not always how my brain works. While learning one thing, I suddenly get curious about something else… and before I know it, I’m researching an entirely different topic.

At the time, I was learning Python. I already knew quite a bit, but I was still very much in the learning phase. The same goes for performance testing, honestly. I still have a long way to go, but I can talk about it now. So this blog is basically my beginner’s opinion about Locust and my experience learning it.

My First Impression of Locust

When I first googled Locust and opened the website, I’m not even going to lie… I barely understood what I was looking at.

But looking back now, that wasn’t really Locust’s fault. I was still learning, and if you asked me to revisit the website today, I’d probably approach the whole learning process very differently.

One thing about me is that whenever I start learning something new, I immediately begin writing things down in my notebook. Every little discovery, every mistake, every “AHA” moment goes in there. Mostly because I have the memory span of a goldfish and would otherwise forget half the important stuff five minutes later.

So I kept documenting my experience while figuring things out little by little.

The Moment Things Started Clicking

At some point, Koen asked me to explain what I had learned during a workshop.

Now, I wanted to approach things differently instead of turning it into a traditional presentation where information just gets dumped onto people. I wanted it to feel more like an information-sharing session where everyone could exchange insights and learn together. Because at the end of the day… I was still learning too.

So instead of pretending I knew everything, I explained my pitfalls, the things I struggled with, and the ways I approached learning the tool.

And honestly? That helped a lot.

Sharing my mistakes and discoveries gave everyone else a faster jumpstart, and in return, I got to pick their brains too. Mwahaha :D

Eventually, we held a session together about how we would build a performance testing framework as a team. Weirdly enough, after that discussion, everything suddenly clicked into place. Concepts around performance testing that had previously felt abstract started to make sense, which also made the direction and purpose of the tool itself much clearer.

So… How Does Locust Actually Work?

The cool thing about Locust is that it’s actually pretty simple once you understand the basics.

You run the command:

locust <fileName>

And Locust launches a GUI interface for you.

Inside that interface, you can fill in your base URL, which Locust then uses to execute the endpoints you wrote in your code.

Simple enough… until authentication enters the chat.

Because of course, many endpoints require login flows, tokens, sessions, and all those fun things.

Figuring out how to structure that properly took me a while. Mostly because I’m a lazy programmer. And by lazy, I mean I love reusable code. I don’t want to rewrite the same thing ten times if I can avoid it.

That mindset created a pretty steep learning curve for me when working with Locust. Understanding how to structure reusable authentication flows and reusable request logic definitely took some experimenting.

But honestly? Once you start understanding how Locust wants you to structure things, it works really well. I started seeing the structure behind it, and that made it very easy to set up a test directly from the customer side.

What I Really Learned

I think the biggest thing I learned during this journey wasn’t necessarily about Locust itself.

It was about learning how I learn.

At first, I thought I needed to understand absolutely everything before I could explain it to others. But teaching the little things I did know actually accelerated my learning process way more than sitting alone and endlessly reading documentation.

Talking with the team, hearing different opinions, discussing framework setups, and learning from each other made everything feel way less intimidating.

And that’s probably my favorite part of working in tech: nobody really learns completely alone.

Final Thoughts

I didn’t want to write another step-by-step tutorial about Locust. There are already plenty of those online.

I mostly wanted to share my experience with the tool and how my journey with it started.

So now you know my Locust story…

What’s holding you back from giving it a try? :p