The Home of Web Automation — A different take on a software blog

About a month ago, I decided to take my passion and knowledge on web automation and testing and turn them into a blog. That came to be The Home of Web Automation

The Actual Need

In the last few years the scene of Web Automation has received a surge of attention from the software industry, and that is not without reason.

• Reliability is a must for both new-found companies and large enterprises alike.
• Applications are more interactive and a fair amount of times frontend heavy, meaning that they are responsible for orchestrating lots of different actors.
• Manual repetitive tasks and testing is still proving to be a real pain when trying to move fast.

All of the above (and tons more) appear to be fair reasons to invest in the skills, technologies and methodologies that revolve around web automation.

Additionally there seems to be a considerable gap in the technical skills that individuals require to succeed in these efforts, I aim to help as much as possible with that. For people that want more information on the topic, there is a 2020 survey around open-source web automation testing tools that is quite revealing.

Being in the shoes that most people reading this post have been, I can sympathize with the fact that this can be just another topic to learn. Understanding the information fatigue that the software industry has been bearing on its denizens, I will try my best to make the experience as joyful as possible.

The Different Take

From my experiences in the world of software and how rapidly it is progressing, all the frameworks, the libraries, the techniques, it can make one feel really anxious and fatigued about being required to consume and understand all of these intricacies. More articles to read, more podcasts to listen to, more conference talks that you would put in your “todo” list.

Is it important ? Heck yes it is. Your career, financials and dreams might depend on it. But in this race, can there be a relaxing spot where you can keep getting the relevant technical stuff ?

Why not give it a try? That was what I felt like at least while building this website.

During the process of putting together the visual aspect, pallete, fonts, image sources and the like, I decided to take a different route than what would be expected on a software related site.

A warm kind of pallete

Playful, almost meaningless drawings

I cannot stress enough how much I love Excalidraw💙 and how extensively I will be using it to create some meaningless drawings (But also for the diagrams required) for each post. As it sparks some joy for me, I hope it does the same to you!

Weird cursive fonts

Using Caveat from Google Fonts seemed to fit my target amazingly well.

A try on software jokes

If at some point I prompt you to install left-pad or throw a joke at some website’s UX decision, please understand it is benevolent 😁

The interface is composed of elements that their purpose is to make you more energetic and spark the feeling of happiness when you open a page, even while not being the most readable. Actually this became one of the top goals to be reflected on the user interface.

Closing

If you are into web automation, testing and all the ecosystem around those, you can follow for new content @HomeOfWebAuto. I would be writting about how I built the blog in a later post

Any feedback is appreciated, if you have any questions/request reach out to me and I hope you enjoy it!