It's no secret that we're big fans of the Selenium project. Selenium's screen capture facilities provide a key bit of the infrastructure that Mogotest runs on. And, since we're distributing those jobs to our cloud-based render agents, we need a way to manage that, too. That's where Selenium Grid comes into play.

Selenium Grid is basically a framework for distributing Selenium tasks across many hosts (in our case, via our EC2 render cluster). This allows us to run our tests in parallel and deliver results to users as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Grid was originally developed and maintained by Phillippe Hanrigou of ThoughtWorks and has received contributions from numerous people, including Mogo co-founder Kevin Menard. Earlier this month, Phillippe announced that he would be stepping down from the project and was looking for a new maintainer. Kevin was one of the folks who was nominated to fill his shoes, and it now looks like he's officially got the gig.

What does this announcement mean for Selenium Grid? It means that the project will have an active maintainer who (despite his obvious personality flaws) has a serious commitment to pushing the project codebase forward, fixing bugs, and fostering community involvement -- things that every mature open source project needs. Good stuff! And it's good for us, too. For exactly the same reasons.

So congratulations on the new responsibility, Kevin. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing how Se Grid evolves under the new project leadership.