When people ask me what I do, I like to say that I write software to test software.

I ended up here somewhat by accident. I worked as a UI designer and developer of unix-based desktop applications for a good chunk of my career (stretching back to the late 80’s). Tool development was always something I liked to do on the side, and I’ve always also been at least tangentially involved in software testing.

A few years ago I found myself on a team that was asked to help deploy a test automation solution for one of the larger online travel websites. We built a fun team, did some cool stuff, and learned a lot. Eventually I ended up following my manager to another gig where we got to do that all over again. New team, same goals. At that second place I had an even more amazing team, and we were quite successful.

One downside to that gig was that we weren’t allowed to give back some of our work to the open source community. This was really important to me, so when an opportunity presented itself to do this all again at another company, along with being able to make the code open source, I jumped at the chance.

I’ve been here a while now and some of the projects are starting to see the light of day, so I figured it was time to start this blog. This gives me a place to write down the things I’ve learned from the past, and the things I learn as we go through this process one more time.

I hope you find some of the information here useful.

Bryan Oakley

To email me, use firstname.lastname at gmail. Sorry for the obfuscation, but I’m trying to keep the spam to a minimum.