In this blog, as usual, I speak for myself, not for the organizations I occasionally represent. I represent so many organizations in general that I find it hard to say which hat, and when. I try to step away when there is a conflict of interests. I am employee of Vaisala, entrepreneur of maaretp. I am board member of Tivia and project leadership committee (PLC) member of Selenium. I'm chairman of Software Testing Finland ry (Ohjelmistotestaus ry). And I'm running TechVoices initiative to help new speakers with a few other lovely people. My work and my hobbies are not the same, but they are synergetic.
This is all relevant, because I am about to write about Selenium. I'm writing this as me, with all the experiences I have, and not sitting on the powers assigned to me on taking part on decisions about any of these organizations.
The little old me has now had a month of being welcomed with open hearts and minds into the lovely Selenium community. My paths had crossed with Selenium, first in organizations I work in, then in other communities having love/hate relationship with all things GUI automation including Selenium, and then as keynote speaker at Selenium Conference India. I had come to learn Simon Stewart is a lovely human, and that Manoj Kumar is great to have around when you aspire to learn a lot, and that David Burns cares about all the right things. I had been infected with the knowledge of Pallavi Sharma, reinvigorated with the conversations with Pooja Shah, and watched in admiration the work Puja Jagani is doing with contributing to the project. Now that I hang out in the Selenium community slack, I have discovered how great and welcoming Titus Fortner is, and how much heart and time everyone there puts on things. The people who invited and welcomed me into Selenium PLC, thank you: Marcus Merrell, Bill McGee, Diego Molina and my trustworthy contact, Manoj Kumar. Manoj is the reason I joined, just to get the chance of working more with him more.
It is fair to say I am here for the people. Not only for the people I now mentioned, or the people in that slack group, a totally intimidating number of 11,133, or the people who already use Selenium, or the 24.6k that star Selenium in GitHub (add a star here!). But the people who get to cross paths with Selenium also in the future.
I joined the project work, even if I am a self-proclaimed 'playwright girl', because I believe the ethos of choosing one to rule them all isn't the best of the industry. Having many means we look around for inspirations, and there is a significant thing in Selenium that should inspire us all:
It's been around a long time and has never stopped evolving. 18 years is an impressive commitment, that that is just looking back!
So if you have heard the rumours of "Selenium losing steam", I think you may be working with information that is constantly changing and jury is still out, and evidence where I see it isn't very conclusive.
In this world of fast changes and things evolving, with difficult to grasp messages, I'm adding to the confusion until I reach clarity. I'm starting my modeling of the world from a corner close to me, python.
Took a moment sensemaking selenium on python (with a twist to playwright) for myself. The tools that sit on top and their features were what I labelled. I might eventually get this right, this is v. 0.1. pic.twitter.com/l5eGqioBGs
— Maaret Pyhäjärvi (@maaretp) September 15, 2022
I hope to find us on a mutual route of discovering clarity, and would - just as me - welcome you to join whatever we together can cook up with the Selenium open source project. Open means that you can see too much, but also choose what your interests are.
