Several months ago I downloaded a copy of Selenium to evaluate how we could use it to improve automated acceptance or functional testing at Spoke. It was quite an useful tool but we didn’t have cycles for setting up some sort of infrastructure for running the tests. When I saw there was going to be an upcoming meetup, I thought it would be a good opportunity to try to get inspired on using Selenium again and also learn what is new in the world of Selenium. On April 20, 2010 I attended the San Francisco Selenium Meetup at Sauce Labs (the folks behind Selenium) where the topic of the evening was “Testing Tools Demo Night.” The night included 4 speakers and demos and an opportunity to talk to the folks at Sauce Labs about their products. I even won 1000 minutes of Sauce OnDemand. More…

Several weeks ago, on March 31, 2010, Twitter hosted a talk about Neo4j at the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. If you are not familiar with Neo4J it is a database that stores data as a graph, with nodes, relationships (edges), and attributes (of the node). As far as I could glean from the presentation the graph is directed and can be weighted as well. From my perspective there are a few aspects of Neo4J that are quite impressive. First, the simplicity of the API let’s you get up and running in very little time. Next, the performance is quite remarkable with 1M nodes with each node having 50 connections, it takes only 2 milliseconds to find out if there is a path between two randomly chosen nodes. It also allows for transactions and rollbacks. More…

The Search SIG of SDForum has a really interesting talk on March 30, 2010 about social search with the co-founder of Aardvark, Damon Horowitz. When I saw that this talk was coming up, I was immediately drawn to it for a few reasons. First, social search is a somewhat new idea, the definition of which differs depending on who you talk to or what you read. Second, I’m an active Aardvark user and I was interested in some of the inner workings of this very effective and powerful service. More…