Category Archives: Web

JSConf and NodeConf – 2011

Last week was both JSConf and NodeConf in Portland, OR and it was absolutely epic. I spend all year looking forward to the various Portland conferences, but this year happened to also be my first JSConf.us, the first ever NodeConf and a lot of thick bacon. If you aren’t aware of that term, it has become a great way to gauge the accumulated awesomeness regarding the quality of experience at a conference. I believe this was coined at one of … Continue reading

Posted in Automation, JavaScript, Jellyfish, Node, Open Source, Web | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Node.JS is a Swimming Pool

Over the past six months I have heard about the unbelievable awesomeness involved in this project called Node.JS. At first I thought, “Server Side JS NOT on the JVM” – YAY! Then after a few days of that I thought, “I really don’t care about server side code, even if it is JS”. See the thing is, right out of college I started fooling with raw DOM, cross browser event firing and capturing and building pretty big cool projects without … Continue reading

Posted in CouchDB, JavaScript, Node, Open Source, Technology, Web | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

iPad’s, iPhone’s, iThink I’m going broke

Some of you may know that over the past few years I have been a bit of a early adopter, when it comes to Apple products. A few years ago, it was considerably easier — since the rate of product releases felt much slower and the increase in technological capabilities of each of the revisions seems significantly less compelling than today. I remember thinking, I have a Macbook Pro and an iPod — what else could Apple possibly release that … Continue reading

Posted in Life, Location Aware, Technology, Web | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

My new gig – Sauce Labs

After almost two years of working at Slide Inc, I have started my new job at Sauce Labs. The press release can be found here: “Sauce Labs Adds Windmill Test Framework Co-Creator Adam Christian to Engineering Team“. Slide Inc. I had a fantastic experience and learned a ton working with the really talented team of engineers, artists and product managers over at Slide. It was incredibly educational to work in an environment where so many people use your product everyday. … Continue reading

Posted in Automation, Career, Continuous Integration, Life, Open Source, Startup, Technology, Uncategorized, Web, Windmill, Work | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Considering in-house web automation?

Recently I have had numerous conversations with people at various tiers of companies all over the place who are toying with the idea of building their own test automation and continuous integration infrastructure. Since I have spent a considerable amount of time dealing with such undertakings I decided that it might be worth the time to brain dump some of the issues you may want to consider before you dive in. Choosing Tools Boxes, VM’s or Cloud? A common first … Continue reading

Posted in Automation, Continuous Integration, Firefox, Hudson, java, JavaScript, Open Source, Python, Review, Technology, Web, Work | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Windmill Plugin for Hudson

Over the last 6+ months, I have been using Hudson in conjunction with Windmill very heavily for continuous integration. For the most part using the build step specific to whatever the slave OS requires has worked sufficiently well until recently when my needs changed. I use the ‘configuration matrix’ option to build a matrix of browsers to run the tests, this way I can have one job that represents a test run on multiple boxes and multiple browsers on each … Continue reading

Posted in Automation, Continuous Integration, java, Open Source, Slide, Technology, Web, Windmill, Windmill-dev | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

PyCon 2009 Recap

Getting back in the swing of things after conferencing for weeks can be pretty painful, thus the lateness of the post. However I think it’s important to go over some thoughts still lingering in my brain as a result. First off, I have to say that for those of you who don’t know, PyCon is a community organized event, and amazingly well done. I was impressed by the design of the conference, the way they had four talks going on … Continue reading

Posted in Automation, Career, Continuous Integration, JavaScript, Open Source, Python, Slide, Technology, Web, Windmill, Windmill-dev | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Micro-Bookmarking with MyTabs

A few weeks ago I realized that every time I boot my laptop, one of the first things I do is to open Firefox, and immediately load about 7 web sites as tabs. Some of them requiring user interaction to navigate to the desired state. I didn’t realize that this was actually a phenomenon called “micro-bookmarking”, and that I may not be the only person who has this routine. I don’t necessarily want to bookmark these sites, and this process … Continue reading

Posted in Firefox, JavaScript, Mozilla, Open Source, Web | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

XUSH (.01), you know it’s fun to say.

Over the past 8 months I have been neck deep in XUL and XPCOM and with Venkman being as unintuitive as it is I have badly needed a shell with access to the trusted space in the browser. I also had a couple more requirements, which were that it was super easy to get at (keyboard shortcut), and that it looks awesome (transparency required). Since making things looks really nice in XUL is really hard, I decided that I would build … Continue reading

Posted in Firefox, JavaScript, Mozilla, Open Source, Python, Web | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Meet lookupNode

A few months ago I did a re-write of the DOM access functionality used by Windmill and various other projects of mine and the result was a wrapper around ElementsLib called lookupNode. I use this all over internally but until today didn’t realize that it could be hugely helpful for test developers and people trying to debug their applications. The following list are the different options you have for looking up your node: link xpath id name value classname tagname … Continue reading

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