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A long time ago, I used to say that there were two missing roles on any software project: the Software Archaeologist and the Project Witness.

Here’s the plan.

TL;DR “Agents in agents driving scripts” is a pattern for handling large-scale, mechanical changes using AI.

I’ve written code which is still in widespread use today that’s old enough to be considered an adult in the UK.

The code you’ve written means nothing until it’s in the hands of users.

In one of the groups I’m part of, someone recently asked “Does anyone have opinions on monorepos?

One of the things I like to talk about with my teams is the goal of getting a new line of code into production as quickly, as safely, and as cheaply as possible.

To know where we’re going, it helps to know where we’ve come from.

I have Keanu Reeves to thank for one of my favourite life mottos: Be excellent to each other.

Recently, Bazel 5 was released.

Our solar system formed from a cloud of dust and gas.

Sometimes, just sometimes, I need to work on a machine that isn’t running macOS.

If everything has gone according to plan, my blog should now be hosted properly on the new site.

Ah!

A friend of mine messaged me a while ago, and reminded me that my blog had been dormant for a very long time.

The last time I updated this site was sometime in 2012.

Well, it’s been a long time since I sat down and wrote a post about the adventures in Selenium-land.

The month from February to March has been a fun one.

January was a quiet month for Selenium hacking, but it laid the groundwork for February’s efforts.

You may have noticed a distinct lack of an update last month.

I’ve had the pleasure of being a co-editor of the W3C’s WebDriver spec, as well as the original author and one of the current maintainers of Selenium’s Java bindings, and one of the main authors of the current Selenium Server, particularly the pieces to do

A monorepo helps reduce the cost of software development.

How should a monorepo be organised?

One argument against monorepos is that you need special tooling to make them work.

The concept of a monorepo seems so self-evident that there is little need to define it.

Another month, another update, you lucky people.

I realise that this blog has been pretty quiet.

Write a poem about a sunrise.

Recently, I’ve had a few too many things on my plate to deal with, and have been flirting with burn out, so it’s time to take stock and stop being an idiot.

What is a monorepo?

Java has been forked, and Google is the reason.

I enjoyed breaking the world up into two kinds of developers so much, I thought I’d do it again.

It is, of course, a gross overgeneralisation to say that there are two kinds of developers in the world.

This document represents a series of guidelines for writing code that will swiftly pass code review with my team.

I’d thought that this was part of the automated testing canon already, but apparently not, so a quick note on the naming of tests appears to be in order.

A note so that I never forget again: the time used by a ZipEntry instance in Java appears to keep ticking.

I tend to get a few requests a day asking for help with a problem with Selenium.

At work I’m part of a distributed team.

The UNIX philosophy can be described in many ways (and the Wikipedia page has plenty), but I’ve always admired its practical application in the wealth of shell commands available to a user.

I was reading a blog the other day that highlighted the fact that I’ve only got a limited number of keystrokes to use up in my working life.

One of the things that I love most about working in tech is the chances I get to speak in public and share some of the knowledge I’ve somehow managed to accumulate (even, sometimes, about work that I’ve actually done myself!)

Note to self: as an OSS project becomes more successful, the level of clue on the mailing lists drops.

It’s hardly an original thought, but it’s interesting to me that the location of a majority of someone’s computing power has moved from their personally controlled space to datacentres.

As a follow-up from “Switching between Java 6 and 7 on OS X”, here’s how to remove Java 7 entirely: # First the JDK cd /Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/ sudo rm -rf jdk1.7\* # And now the JRE cd /Library/Internet\\ Plug-Ins/ sudo rm -rf JavaAp…

You’ve finally got fed up enough with whatever your current problem is to ask for help from someone.

Ever hear of “talking to the teddy”?

This took me too long to figure out, so I’m writing this up now.

Code bases, eh?

It’s been quiet here, and its going to get quieter here for a bit longer: I’m taking some time off to spend with The Boy and The Wife.

Six or so years ago, Jason Huggins and I were talking about the next generation of web testing tools.