You know what is hard? Changing jobs is hard. Testing web applications is hard. Luckily for me, I have an opportunity to tackle both problems at once!
I am happy to announce that I am joining the awesome Cypress.io team. This is a big personal change. I spent last three years developing web applications for financial startup, Kensho. I was happy to see Kensho grow from 10 people to 75 and sign very first contracts.
I want the software to be better and by extension make the world a better place
I loved mentoring the smartest junior developers straight from Harvard and MIT. I was proud to be able to travel the world speaking about software development at many conferences.
Yet over time the gap between what Kensho needed from me and what excited me about the software development in the first place grew larger and larger.
I want to make the world’s web apps work without crashing. I want websites to load quickly. I want malicious scripts to be stopped in their tracks. I want the software to be better and by extension make the world a better place; and I have even named my blog Better world by better software!
This is why I became a passionate advocate of Cypress the second I saw the testing tool they have written. From my very first blog post Web testing nirvana with Cypress exactly 1 year ago, I was using Cypress to make sure my web applications worked exactly as intended; and it has never failed me.
Believe me when I say testing is hard; I wrote more than 60 blog posts exploring this topic! Yet Cypress does some amazing tricks to achieve what Phantom / Karma / Selenium could not - make the end to end tests as fast and useful as unit tests. Even better than speed: with full rewindable view of the test, I can see what the test was doing step by step, similar to time traveling debugger. And if the test failed, I could step through the UI to see where and why it went wrong. The hunt for root cause of the failure has never been quicker.
While Cypress is an Atlanta-based startup, I will stay in Boston - a hub of technical talent and a startup powerhouse. This gives me a chance to continue speaking at New England meetups, advising fellow engineers on all software quality topics, and hopefully gain enough perspective to make Cypress commercial offerings a runaway hit.
While Cypress is an Atlanta-based startup, I will stay in Boston.
Speaking of Cypress offerings, have you heard we are open sourcing our entire testing application? We realize that clients do NOT their tests to stop working if our closed-source app is discontinued; we do not like vendor lock in ourselves. To make money we are working on the SaaS solution that analyzes test run history, compares test results, diffs snapshots - all these things that are now possible to do thanks to the Cypress’s advanced test runner. Check out the Cypress Dashboard for a taste!
I am incredibly excited to be helping Cypress; my professional interests and the company goals are aligned better than at any point in my career. Let’s see where this journey takes us.