May 2020 Summaries

Jos de Jong is a passionate programmer and creator of Mathjs, JSONEditor, and other open source projects. He believes in building useful software that solves real problems for users. Juggling multiple projects can be challenging, but he maintains a routine to manage his time effectively. Dealing with community-driven issues requires balancing user needs with personal goals. For new developers entering the open source world, de Jong advises working on something they believe in and enjoying the process. Testing is crucial for ensuring software quality, and simple tools are preferred over complex ones. Building a supportive community involves being respectful and maintaining a constructive attitude. In his spare time, de Jong enjoys spending time with family and playing computer games.

Over the last three months, BrowserStack has released several updates to its product lineup, including Local Binary v8.0, which simplifies setup and session monitoring for users testing privately hosted builds. The company also added new capabilities and improved parallelization support for its TestCafe integration. For App Automate, a new Capabilities Builder for Appium was introduced, along with the BrowserStack CLI for managing automated mobile app tests. In addition, improvements were made to Live and App Live testing experiences, including increased idle session timeouts, faster Edge browsers, better bug filing, and more streamlined uploading processes. Finally, four new Android devices and several desktop browsers have been added to BrowserStack's offerings.

BrowserStack Summer of Learning is a free webinar series covering test automation with Selenium and BrowserStack. The first episode, 'The Basics: Getting started with Selenium', introduced viewers to the basics of Selenium, setting up and writing their first test scripts, and picking the best frameworks for them. Topics covered in this post include structuring tests, testing builds with a VPN, using BrowserStack Local Testing, handling authentication/login screens and pop-ups, running parallel testing without using DesiredCapabilities in Specflow, reusing scripts across devices, capturing video during testing, and contributing to Selenium.