Category Archives: Conferences

Have you always wanted to automate minesweeper?

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I am running a contest as part of the Test Automation Bazaar in Austin, Texas from March 23-24.

The challenge is to write a robot that plays (and wins) expert games of minesweeper. You can use whatever language and tool you like. A colleague of mine, Mark Ryall, and myself have written a web version of minesweeper from scratch using Coffeescript. It’s available to play at minesweeper.github.com.

Full details of the contest are on the conference web site hosted on watir.com.

Good luck! It sounds easier than it is.

Watir Day 2011 San Francisco: My Takeaways

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Watir Day 2011 in San Francisco was a great success. I personally took a lot away from the day including:

  • We organized and promoted Watir Day in a very lightweight way, but managed to attract over 60 attendees and 10 sponsors!
  • The key to Watir’s success has been its community, focus on building a tool for testers, and not trying to be everything to everyone.
  • Watir is seen as a secret sauce for a lot of web companies – they are very hesitant to talk about it publically in case their competitors copy them. But we managed to hear a few of those stories for the first time on the day:
    • Watir is a key part of Facebook’s engineering culture: they have been extremely successful with Watir, after failing with Selenium.
    • Convio has been so successful with in house open source test automation using Watir that they have phased out outsourced testing altogether, and are hiring more automated test engineers than ever.
  • An individual’s involvement in an open source project can be inversely proportional to how happy they are in their job – not happy at work = less commits, more happy at work = less commits (via Bret Pettichord)
  • The future is bright for Watir. Using WebDriver technology will enable us to deliver a tool designed for testers to testers, but an increasing range of browser and device support.

The questionnaire results speak for themselves:

Watir Day Fun

The slides are available online.

MarekJ at Watir Day

Watir Day 2011 Tickets now available for $50

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Tickets to Watir Day 2011 on Sunday 3rd April 2011 in San Francisco are now on sale for $50 each.

Don’t forget about the sponsorship deal where your employer or company can be a sponsor for just $175 and receive four free tickets. This sponsorship can be purchased through the main ticket page too.

All proceeds from the event go to cover costs and to support the Watir project. And to cover the cost of your special Watir Day t-shirt (include your t-shirt size when you register).

More information about Watir Day can be found here.

Watir Day is happening in San Francisco on Sunday April 3rd 2011

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Just to let everyone know Watir day is happening in San Francisco on Sunday April 3rd, 2011. It’s the day before the Selenium Conference officially starts, to which most of the core Watir team will be attending.

I am hoping to share some of the stuff I have been doing with Watir, Watir-WebDriver, Selenium & Cucumber.

We’re hoping the Watir day will be less formal than the conference, and this includes hacking, so please bring along your laptop.

Hope to meet you there! http://watir.com/watir-day/

Thoughts on Thoughtworks Australia Team Hug September 2010

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I haven’t started yet at Thoughtworks (it’s still a week away), so I felt very privileged to be invited to the the bi-annual Thoughtworks Australia Team Hug over the weekend in country Victoria.

The weekend consisted of a series of talks and heaps of fun. I really enjoyed the talks by Martin Fowler on DSLs (Domain Specific Languages) and Chris Bushell on how to avoid branching code which was interesting as it relates to the new focus on Continuous Delivery.  I also enjoyed the two Dev-Ops talks, one frightening story by Tom Sulston and a much calmer one by Evan Bottcher. I need to look more closely into the Twist automated testing tool after seeing a demonstration of its features.

Besides the talks, there was a great Wild West themed party on Saturday night, complete with a photo booth that produced lots of hilarious photos. I dressed up as a cowboy, complete with chaps, boots, hat and guns. People went to huge effort in getting dressed up, there was even someone in a giant cow costume!

I managed to fit in a nice morning stroll on Sunday morning to enjoy the fresh country air and surroundings, which was very pleasant as I live in the city-city.

It was a great introduction to Thoughtworks culture and people and an all round enjoyable event.

Australian Test Automation Workshop (TAW) 2009

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TAW 2009 is coming up on August 27 & 28 and I have already confirmed my attendance (GTAC is a very long flight!) and created a LinkedIn event. TAW is held every year at Bond University on the Gold Coast in Australia.

I did a quick presentation last year, and I think I might do something a bit different this year.

You can download the presentation in full here.

CITCON Brisbane 2009 is on next month

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I am the local coordinator for CITCON Brisbane, a free software testing and continuous integration conference being held on the Friday evening of June 26 and Saturday June 27 at the Acacia Ridge Hotel in Brisbane.

CITCON

The only catch is that it is limited to 150 people and we already have 100+ registered so be quick and register!