Jason Huggins 🛠️
@hugs
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Following
7,247
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3,436
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26,794
I make robots 🤖 at @tapsterbot . Started @saucelabs , @seleniumhq , @appiumdevs , @pinthing ... and a new thing ➡️ @valetnet
Chicago (Oak Park)
Joined September 2007
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As a middle-aged white guy tech CEO in Chicago named Jason, I just want to say: Everything's political. Especially tech. I want to work with people who care about the effect we have on people & society. Otherwise, middle-aged white guys named Jason are going to fuck it up.
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Kinda funny how Twitter only shows your current photo next to your old tweets.
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Venture capital is rocket fuel. It's not useful if you're not building a rocket. And VCs only really want to give rocket fuel to rocket builders, anyway. Regardless, rocket fuel is dangerous and difficult to handle properly.
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After years of avoiding it, I'm finally making my own containers. That's right... copper-lined pine box Faraday cages! It actually works! It can block WiFi, Bluetooth, and LTE. (Useful for device and app testing.) I might need to start a TikTok "Will it Faraday?" series...
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Dear Silicon Valley: Want to really change the world? Be brave and start your next company in the Midwest. There are millions of reasons.
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I wonder when Basecamp customers will start to wonder if any of their other sensitive data is on an internal list made for laughs. Or if their Hey emails are being read... and on a list for laughs. The self-inflicted PR crisis is looking kinda fractal at this point.
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My son thinks testing is fun. He calls it "glitching", though. He does it to every game he tries. His favorite glitch is to turn off Wi-Fi, set the clock back 30 days, start the game, set the clock forward, collect all the time-based rewards, then send a note to the game devs.
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Why does it feel like the Federal Government has seceded from the Union?
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Why does it feel like the Federal Government has seceded from the Union?
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So we have a new robot at Tapster. 🎉 (We're calling it "Tapster 3".) Was planning to make them in all black, but I'm kinda liking the red. What do you think?
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Open source software is free as in free house. If you want to fix or improve something, either learn to do it yourself or pay a contractor.
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No big deal, just teaching my robot how to terminate... apps.
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When a founder tries to defend their bigotry by talking about how many other employees are *also* carelessly mishandling customer data *and* admitting it's been going on for years... you're going to need a bigger policy statement.
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Just confirmed it's possible to use an Arduino Micro to simulate gestures and taps on iOS 13. I could be wrong, but I think this is big news for iOS test automation. I'll go into more detail in my AppiumConf keynote on June 15th in Bengaluru.
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I'm starting to think "The company has enough cash in the bank to cover payroll and all other expenses for over two+ years" is an employee benefit that will be an important differentiator in hiring in the future.
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VCs will be angry if you end up burning that rocket fuel building a car or a plane instead of a rocket, no matter how awesome the car or plane that you built is, because they promised *their* investors (LPs) that they would only invest in rockets.
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In a classic dad/son moment, he didn't agree that "glitching" is at all similar to what I do for a living. "Dad, your robots just do the same thing over and over again. Boring. I'm trying new things in new apps all the time."
(Somewhere,
@michaelbolton
is smiling.)
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Chicago final got its Elevator Pitch™️ as a city.
(via the Pivot podcast with
@karaswisher
and
@profgalloway
)
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Selenium is the biggest open source success story never told. We're now at exactly 20 years since the first lines of code were written. Since then, it has launched countless careers and companies. Did you know the Selenium Test Automation User Group on LinkedIn alone has almost
Closing keynote for
#SeleniumConf
2024 from Simon and Jason celebrating 20 years of
#selenium
. Fascinating learning how
#Selenium
and
#WebDriver
came together in the earlier days of the project.
@hugs
@shs96c
@seleniumhq
#Live
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Well, this escalated quickly. Will start printing tonight. Putting in an order to pick up PETg sheets (the clear shield part) and laser cut them tomorrow. Have a local doctor lined up who wants to see one asap. Game on.
Should Tapster start printing face shields? (We have eight 3D printers in the office.) Hard to tell if this will make a difference or not... or just make things worse.
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Happy Birthday,
@SeleniumHQ
! On October 28, 2004, Selenium was released into the wild for the first time. 🎂🥳🤖
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First rule of robotics start-up club: Solve a real problem
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The secret to getting good at anything: Start by being bad at something. The 🔑 is to start.
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I'm really liking how the new Tapster 3 is coming along. Starting to look like something you'd see in a Star Wars movie... This one will soon be on its way to its new home in the Chicago area! (iPhone not included)
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I accidentally said "ham holding" (instead of hand holding) in a conversation and now it's my favorite malaprop. e.g. "This project will need some extra ham holding in the near future."
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TSA Agent: What *is* this?
Me: It's a robot.
TSA Agent: Ooh, fancy. What does it do?
Me: It's an open source tool for democratizing the means of production for the proletariat.
TSA Agent:
Me: Just kidding. It plays Angry Birds.
TSA Agent: Move along, sir.
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But if you've clearly already built a rocket (perhaps after years of bootstrapping), and it's now obvious that you can reach orbit -- if only you had enough fuel -- then venture capital, err rocket fuel, might make sense.
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There are 4 kinds of CI systems:
1) Too simple.
2) Too complex.
3) Abandoned.
4) Eff it, I'll build my own. How hard could it be?
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The first program I ever wrote was with a Big Trak at age 4 in preschool. We would set it up to navigate around a few obstacles then knock over a tower of wooden blocks. Pure joy. When Big Trak was re-released a few years ago, I had to get one. Here's how you program it:
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Everyone can play a part in the Resistance. Me? I'm cooking dinner for the kids while my wonderful spouse is working overtime on lawsuits shutting down Trump's baby jails.
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No board can fire you. No employee can stop you. No single customer can hurt you. When you're on a mission fighting "the man" (VCs, Big Tech, etc.), you might want these protections for good reasons. But when you finally get them, you become the enemy you were fighting all along.
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Flashback to that time when I stubbornly refused to learn how to design printed circuit boards because I already knew how to breadboard...
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Worked my fingers off making these robots the last few weeks for a repeat customer. Finally shipping them out today. A bit of a pain to assemble, though. But I now have lots of ideas for simplifying the design & build process. It's amazing how hard it is to make something simple.
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The weird thing about robotics is that as soon as you solve an actual problem with a robot, it's no longer a robot. It's a vacuum cleaner, a 3D printer, a car or delivery vehicle, but not a robot, and definitely a little boring. Cool robots are almost by definition useless.
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I'm never rebooting my laptop right before I give a conference talk ever again... 😱
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This post is so spot-on, I wouldn't be surprised if someone at Google asks them (or "tells" them) to pull it:
http://bit.ly/fo43H9
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Making chicken tikka masala again tonight. A crowd favorite in this house. I'm proud that I've finally learned to use up spices before they expire. I hope I will have earned the right to get the mega-jar of cumin next time.
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The Selenium project will be hitting its 16th birthday this year. It's old enough to be CarDriver, now.
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He says it works in about half (!!!) of the games he tries. He'll even go and check new version release notes weeks or months later in the app store to see if they fixed it. The kid's all right.
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Many SaaS companies' account lists look like a classic power law curve (20% drives 80% of the revenue). But not at Basecamp! Not only have they built a corporate structure to insulate them from employee accountability, but customer accountability, too.
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I know I'm a little late to the game here, but I'm starting to suspect there is a massive imbalance between power and responsibility at Google and other big tech companies. Is "Too Big To Care" the tech world's "Too Big To Fail"?
Wow. Google is shutting down ITA's public-facing APIs. That's an entire ecosystem of airfare startups executed with the stroke of a pen.
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Going through boxes of junk in the basement. It's easy to get rid of extra USB & power cables, but I irrationally can't let go of this Zip drive. Like, what if I need to upload a computer virus to an alien spacecraft to save the planet and their computer only takes Zip disks?!
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The popularity of CR boxes for indoor air filtration is already visible in Home Depot stats.
@corsiaq
@jimrosenthal4
@CleanAirCrewOrg
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If I ever become a teacher, I'm framing this and putting it on the wall behind my desk.
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Vendor webinar: "Selenium sucks! Use our product!"
Vendor website: "System requirements: Selenium"
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Just a reminder that everything started going wrong in the world right after the Cubs won the World Series.
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I successfully made browser automation the most boring thing ever in tech for almost 20 years. Multi-billion dollar industry just automating browsers in the cloud. But you'd never know that reading TechCrunch or The Information. I don't even have my own Wikipedia page. (Another
I love it when a startup is working on something so promising that we talk about strategies for seeming unimportant for as long as possible. Not just because the startup is promising, but because it's so funny.
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Took me a minute to realize this wasn't stop motion animation.
toio: Programmable robotics toy from SONY &
@firstflight_jp
uses small blocks with personality and use papercraft
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Here's a sneak peek at a little project I'm working on: Code Cards. It's a way to create real programs using commands printed on paper. This is a first prototype to see if it can find and identify all the shapes and numbers.
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Working on a small project that requires a single board computer and it kinda blows my mind that it might be cheaper to buy a whole phone (with a screen! battery! two cameras! speakers! buttons! LEDs!) than to use a Raspberry Pi, which also happens to be unobtainium.
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You know you've been playing with electronics too long when you open an Altoids tin and are surprised to find mints.
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Theory: Selling testing tools is like selling insurance. No one thinks they need it until it's really, painfully obvious that they do.
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It's hard to be a Christian as a software engineer. Documentation written 2000 years ago? My brother in Christ, I don't trust anything written more than six months ago.
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Funny, not funny, how software testing only makes headlines when something wasn't tested.
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Reminder: It wasn't just "words". It was a recorded confession of sexual assault & attempted rape. He only apologized for the words.
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To avoid registration laws, I predict drone manufacturers will convert all their products into flying guns.
Breaking: US government will reportedly require all drone purchases to be registered
http://t.co/VsVkVhonU2
http://t.co/8PcXl0agfD
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Exactly one year ago, I traveled to India (via the UK) for the first time. To celebrate the anniversary of my visit to both places, I'm trying to cook chicken tikka masala for the first time. I've never used this many ingredients before in my life. 😬
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The one Twitter feature I would like Elon to implement is to be able to find the tweet that I was just about to tap on before the page auto-refreshed, scrolled away, and is now lost forever, like tears in rain.
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I now realize that wearing an N95 mask that has a built-in vent is highly problematic. They're fine for construction/dust, but not for stopping the *spread* of germs by the wearer. The vent is literally an exhaust port for the virus.
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There's so much 🤪💰 chasing Robotic Process Automation right now. So I'm launching a Selenium-powered RPA stack. The pitch: "Look, most of what those other folks are selling you is 💩-flavored snake oil. You shouldn't buy any RPA stack. But if nothing will stop you, buy ours."
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The first decade of the Selenium project involved a lot dudes. We were so focused on supporting browser diversity and operating system diversity, we were blind to the other more important kinds of diversity a project needs. It's the top bug that needs fixing.
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Just got invited to an exclusive "invite only" event in Chicago where Google, Apple, and a bunch of other tech companies are recruiting software developers. Instead of a résumé, should I bring a sample term sheet for acquiring Tapster?
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@techmariah
Pointers. Specifically, C pointers. The big breakthrough was when I realized the concept was easy to understand, but C's pointer syntax was not.
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@JimLaPorta
Is it possible that "Hamas military intelligence assets" meant "the radio towers on the roof"?
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@chrislhayes
Same vibe.
I still can't believe how quickly ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE DYING PER DAY IN THE U.S. has become normalized.
COVID-19 is now the 3rd leading cause of death in America (~175K) behind cancer (~599K) and heart disease (~647K).
(Sources:
)
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Note to self: NEVER EVER NEVER EVER run "brew update" hours before your conference demo. It breaks *everything*.
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The head of marketing, the lead developer of the iOS app, an open source developer, and a customer support employee are all leaving Basecamp. But not to worry! When you think "Basecamp", the last things you associate with it are marketing, iOS, open source, or customer support.
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It's amazing how much work goes into making something so "simple".
This is a "just press the power button" project for a client. But it had to support any sized phone, with a power button that could be anywhere on either side, with very specific size and power constraints. 📲
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Is anyone else amazed that the two definitions of the word "oversight" are the complete opposite of each other?
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I'm in a technical discussion with other developers and instead of saying "AI" (because no one can agree what that is), we're using the phrase "something using statistics" and it makes me smile.
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Just shipped this Tapster 3 robot off to its new home. Am I imagining things or is it giving off some serious droideka vibes?
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From a parenting perspective, the surprising thing is that my son is super into glitching games because I rarely allow him to level up via in-app purchases.
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Two months into learning French on Duolingo and I'm happy to say I'm fluent! (As long as our conversation is 100% about whether or not I would like to eat a pizza. Or if you would like a pizza. Or two pizzas. Or a pizza with some wine. Or some pizza tomorrow. Or next week.)
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Got a live demo by
@buildlog
at
@tapsterbot
HQ yesterday of his new 6-axis (or as he says "3x2") Grbl_ESP32-powered machine. So cool!
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Just witnessed CPD arrest someone at the Palmer House. I started recording video when I heard the officer say to the suspect, "Don't make me taze you." Officer asked me why I was recording. I replied, "To make sure you don't shoot him." Officer replied to me, "Shame on you!"
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This isn't a debate. This is Thanksgiving dinner with Drunk Uncle.
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Today I cut my own hair for the 8th time this year. I think I'm getting good enough at it that I'm now fully qualified for an ISS mission or the long flight to Mars. (Don't know if NASA or SpaceX will care, but I'm putting this on my résumé anyway.)
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You know that quote by
@reidhoffman
, "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late"?
My first kits back in 2012 shipped with electronics that consisted of an Arduino, a breadboard, and hook-up wire. And the frame was made of wood!
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Random
#FunFact
for the day. Why is the default Appium server port 4723? Hint: On a phone keypad, it spells "ipad".
The longer story: I started working on what eventually became the Appium project because I was tasked with figuring out how to automate iPad apps for a client...
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Microsoft owns JavaScript. Did not have that on my apocalypse bingo card, but I totally should have.
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@shannonrwatts
This continues to break my heart. Fwiw,
@MomsDemand
was well represented at the Oak Park (just west of Chicago) parade this morning.
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@patio11
Funny story, I exist because of an issue like this that happened a long, long time ago. Though it involved a far smaller amount. Both my (future) parents worked at Bankers Trust in NYC. One day, some transfer went sideways, and a lot of money showed up in an account it shouldn't
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#ThrowbackThursday
: One of my favorite mini R&D prototype projects. Always fun when all the stars finally align: the math, the electronics, the software, the 3D printed parts, etc...
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