fun-fact: i’ve by no means used mercury. when i got here up with “selenium” — it was as a result of a colleague at thoughtworks noticed an early demo and mentioned it had the potential to “kill mercury”. (spoiler…

fun-fact: i’ve by no means used mercury. when i got here up with “selenium” — it was as a result of a colleague at thoughtworks noticed an early demo and mentioned it had the potential to “kill mercury”. (spoiler alert!)

however in that second, i hadn’t heard of mercury earlier than, so i needed to google it. i then additionally spent just a few further cycles googling round for a “cure for mercury poisoning” simply so i might proceed the dialog with that colleague with a proto-dad-joke… and landed on a web page about selenium dietary supplements. issues clearly received out of hand.

(i did not need to name the challenge “selenium”. i most well-liked the title “check engine”, however individuals began calling it “selenium” anyway. )

i solely want good issues for the mercury group — the one factor i learn about them is that hp acquired mercury for $4.5B. so i hope they blissfully do not care about me or my dangerous dad-jokes.

however once more… i did not notice there was already a well-established testing instruments business then. (i did have some expertise with “sqa robot” from working at peoplesoft, however that was the extent of it.) all i knew was that i had a testing downside for my sophisticated net app — and the consensus skilled recommendation on the time was “yeah, no. don’t use javascript in the browser — it’s too hard to test”. (one other spoiler.)

additionally, (if i am remembering accurately) mercury was ie/home windows solely… and that i wanted one thing that supported apple and mozilla/firefox. it felt like zero distributors on the time cared about something that wasn’t web explorer or wasn’t home windows. so i needed to chart my very own course fairly rapidly.

lengthy story lengthy: “you either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain” – harvey dent