Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2016 July

# 04 Jul 2016, 04:58PM: Five Loosely Connected Things:

1. Unexpected beauty: There's a little stretch of quiet waterfront walkway with benches tucked away behind the Astoria Costco. It's just north of Rainey Park.
2. Fierce spycrafty women: At the launch party for Genevieve Valentine's new book, Icon, I purchased it plus The Girls at the Kingfisher Club. Both recommended! Valentine engages in a recurring focus on women who fight their way out of institutional and interpersonal status traps -- using deception, self-control, fashion, and any other means at their disposal -- to achieve freedom and security for themselves and those they care about, and I consistently enjoy it.
3. Incisive comedy: Hari Kondabolu has a new album coming out! And he and W. Kamau Bell have a new podcast!
4. A little better every day: Beeminder continues to be a great tool to help me make better choices that will lead me towards my goals.
5. Bees and art: The current exhibition at Socrates Sculpture Park includes a salvaged piano turned into a beehive -- and earthworks and gardens that attract pollinators. I like to imagine it would be a safe place for a woman to make bees in public (short story by Alexandra Erin). That piece of fiction is sad and funny and incisive about the necessity of being fierce and spycrafty in order to be a woman, about bees, about unexpected beauty, and about doing a chunk of work every day and witnessing what emerges. I recommend it.

---

# 14 Jul 2016, 01:08PM: A Great Explanation of WebDriver and Browser Automation: Maja Frydrychowicz's "Untangling WebDriver and the Browser Automation Landscape I Live In" is a delightful, very satisfying read. It covers the difference between the W3C WebDriver specification and Selenium WebDriver, explains their history and future, and uses the Firefox ecology as the concrete browser example so you understand how the components fit together. Also, Frydrychowicz drops in this punchline:

and some day all browsers will implement it in a perfectly compatible way and we'll all live happily ever after.

Upon reading the post, I noted:

I look into the middle distance, more motivated, yet calmer as well. I seem to hear the opening notes of "Fanfare for the Common Man" somewhere behind me. Automated browser testing seemed overwhelming previously, something to be left to Experts who knew this strange tongue. But now I know the power is in my hands; the map gleams and names that formerly confused me now fall into place. My world makes more sense; I have better comprehension of lists like PhantomJS's list of relevant test frameworks and their corresponding test runners. What might not be possible in this fresh new light?

So, if you feel faintly alienated and unmoored when trying to understand automated browser testing, check out the post.

(I know Maja Frydrychowicz because we both participated in the Recurse Center. Want to become a better programmer? Join the Recurse Center!)

---