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. I built a lot of really cool features there for SuperPocus and spent a year building a test automation infrastructure, and molding Windmill to be able to test anything and everything they put in front of me.

Slide was really amazingly understanding as I went through some personal struggles over the past few months. I will miss the people the most, as Slide created a great environment enabling people to effectively work together to solve really challenging problems.

Sauce Labs

Since I moved to the Bay Area, more than once I have seen people leave jobs to goto what they deemed their “dream job”. I never really understood what they meant by that designation until now.

Sauce Labs is solving exactly the class of problems that I find the most interesting, challenging, and sought after by so many people. I’m incredibly grateful and excited to be a part of the team working to make running your tests in the cloud seamless and fast, instead of frustrating and painful. The crew of people I will be working with are second to none and I look forward to learning all I can from them.

Sauce expects everyone to work directly with customers to ensure the best experience, and I look forwarding to helping many new teams get setup with test automation.

Future

It’s hard to outline exactly what future projects I will be involved in, as the technology is moving forward incredibly fast. I do know there are so many ways that we can make the testing community stronger, and the tools better. I see NodeJS and CouchDB opening many doors to new innovations and I would like to continue improving my Python skills.

I will still be within a block from South Park, so let me know if you are in the area and want to grab lunch!

A few things come to mind when I think about the conference as a whole. First off, who gave OSCON a Ruby adrenaline shot? The Ruby track was pretty extensive, and I would say more prominent even than the Python track this year. I felt like many of the talks were very introductory with very few actual visual demo’s of things “working”. I know that OSCON brings a very diverse crowd.. but please, please come up with some way to show us if things are advanced, or not. I really get absolutely nothing out of introductory level JavaScript sessions, but a title like “Digging into the guts of JavaScript” could pretty much mean anything under the sun.

Some of the most interesting talks I attended last year had to do with open mapping and location services, I know you want us to also attend the “Where” conference, but these things are part of Open Source and should be represented at OSCON!

I really enjoyed the talk about CouchDB, I hadn’t heard about it and really enjoyed how it opened my mind up to some new concepts about how your application should interact with a database. I would advise everyone to check it out at http://incubator.apache.org/couchdb/.

Another was the “Django Tricks” talk, this was great because he just ran through a bunch of really cool examples — one of which was introspecting a sqlite db to build models from the schema. Pretty cool stuff! Additionally, I think Ted Leung nailed his talk about “Open Source Community Antipatterns”. A lot of the ideas and concepts weren’t new to me, but it always helps to get a more detailed overview from someone who has seen these patterns repeated over the last 10 years.

The best quote I heard was that the “Second OSCON starts at 6pm each night.” I completely agree with this, the social aspect of the conference is invaluable, but be careful about all those free booze — they sneak up on you if you aren’t careful.

I do feel as if I should have done a Windmill talk this year, I didn’t see anything from Selenium or Watir and if we had been a little farther a long with the next iteration on Windmill it would have been a great venue to get some serious exposure. I may attend some other conferences this year, or wait till OSCON next year for Windmill to make it’s big splash.