The CrossBrowserTesting team is getting excited for SeleniumConf. But as get settled in Chicago, we wanted to take a look back at Selenium’s rich history to highlight some of the faces behind Selenium and meet some of the contributors who’ve made the popular open source automation tool what it is today.
So put a face to the name (or should we say a name to the tool?), and enjoy SeleniumConf Chicago knowing that you are properly brushed up on your Selenium knowledge.
Note that there are plenty more people who have committed to Selenium, so check out the list of contributors on the site. And if you’re feeling inspired, find out how you can get involved with Selenium yourself.
Simon Stewart - Simon Stewart, a.k.a the creator of Selenium Webdriver, is well known by the Selenium community, and for good reason. He’s also a lead Selenium developer, specifically Selenium 2, and a frequent speaker at conferences, which means you don’t want to miss his SeleniumConf “Selenium: State of the Union” keynote. He currently works as a Software Engineer at Deliveroo and has roots at Google, Facebook, and Thoughtworks. Additionally, as Selenium goes through the W3C specification process, Simon is co-editor.
Jason Huggins - Selenium IDE was originally developed by Jason Huggins when he worked at ThoughtWorks in Chicago in 2004 -- making the location of this year’s Selenium Conference fitting. Huggins worked heavily on developing Selenium RC, the IE browser extension, and Selenium Core. Fun fact: he was also responsible for naming Selenium as a cure to Mercury, a competitor.
Paul Hammant - Paul Hammant joined Thoughtworks and helped steer the project towards creating Selenium Remote Control (Selenium RC). While Selenium RC is no longer supported today, Hammant played a critical part in Selenium’s evolution.
Phillipe Hanrigou - In 2008, Phillipe Hanrigou created Selenium Grid and was a committer of Selenium RC. Selenium Grid is a server allows you to multiple run tests on remote machines at the same time through a hub and multiple nodes in order to speed up testing. This method is known as parallel testing, and today it be acheived through a Selenium Grid or with a cloud testing tool like CrosBrowserTesting.
Jim Evans - Jim Evans is no newbie to the software industry. In fact, he’s been part of it for 25 years, working at some major companies including Microsoft, Inuit, and Salesforce, where he works today. Evans is on the Project Steering Committee, and most notably built the IE driver and the .net language bindings. As a contributor to Selenium since 2010, this just skims the surface of all the work he’s done for the project, as well as many other open source projects. But fair warning, #neverflywithjimevans or you may not make it to SeleniumConf on time.
Aslak Hellesoy - Aslak Hellesoy is one of the first contributors to Selenium, but his list of achievements doesn’t stop there. He’s also the creator of Cucumber and co-founder of Cucumber Ltd. Don’t miss his SeleneiumConf talk on “Sub-second Acceptance Tests” where he’ll discuss techniques for making functional acceptance tests run in a fraction of the time.
Ashley Hunsberger - Ashley Hunsberger is a member of the Selenium Steering committee, but you may know her better as co-chair of SeleniumConf, which means she helped put together the killer lineup you’ll be experiencing the next two days. So if you see her this week, make sure to thank her for her work on what is sure to be another amazing conference that brings together a great community of Selenium contributors, enthusiasts, and users.