I joined Sauce Labs as of January 3 this year. I met the people at Sauce Labs during the recent startup crawl in San Francisco (what a great way to find an employer, eh?). Sauce Labs is based around support for the open source Selenium functional testing framework. The inventor of Selenium, Jason Huggins is a founder. I joined Sauce Labs at the same time as Jim Baker and Raymond Hettinger, see here for more. The entire team at Sauce Labs is mind blowingly amazing - which is the main reason that I had to join.

As for the technology, there is a very cool Python backend that supports lots and lots of parallel virtual workloads. I am currently working on Sauce IDE, an extension of Selenium IDE that adds support for Sauce Lab's OnDemand service to the IDE. This lets you record your functional tests from Firefox, and then push those tests up to Sauce Labs where they can be run on various operating systems and browsers in parallel. How cool is that?

Readers of this blog are probably wondering what this means for my role as lead maintainer of Jython. First of all, this is nothing like my former role at Sun Microsystems. Jython is definitely not going to be my day job the way it was at Sun. Since Sauce Labs is an early stage startup, I will be very busy helping the company succeed. Having said that, Sauce Labs is a company based on the use of open source software, and has a strong commitment to giving back to the open source community. They support my continued involvement in the development of Jython. What this means in practice will need to evolve over time.

I'm pretty excited to switch focus from implementing a Python to putting Python code into production. I fully expect that this new job will deepen my understanding of real world Python coding and make my Jython work more productive.