At Sauce Labs, we love open source software. We love the freedom, the efficiencies and the possibilities it provides. That’s why we built a platform leveraging the leading open source functional testing tools: Selenium and Appium, since it’s important to us to earn our customers’ business every day and not attempt to make them beholden to a proprietary solution. We’ve even open-sourced our tutorials, so that we have an easy way for others to notify us of issues or contribute a tweak to the tutorial code (see our PHP Tutorial, for example). We don’t just love open source as a company, we love open source as developers too! We’re constantly trading tips and tricks for refining our open source dev setups, and we think of ourselves as building the kind of testing platform that we would want to use ourselves as open source aficionados. We’re active contributors to and participants in many different open source projects. Besides Selenium and Appium themselves, our devs have contributed to various Selenium/WebDriver client libraries (like Wd.js and Sausage), Selenium Builder, the Monocle async framework for Python (and Javascript), and more. The list goes on!
We recognize the importance of the open source ecosystem to our business. After all, running a test on Sauce involves at least one and usually a whole stack of open source technologies, from the Selenium/WebDriver client libraries to CI servers like Jenkins or Travis-CI. This of course massively impacts customers’ experience of Sauce. It doesn’t matter how blazing fast our cloud of browsers and mobile devices is if someone can’t run a test because some version of their language binding is broken! For this reason we are proud to announce that Sauce is building out a new development team: the Ecosystem and Integrations team. This team complements the existing Infrastructure and Web teams, focusing on opportunities to make our open source ecosystem better and opportunities to provide helpful integrations with other projects and services. We know that navigating an open source ecosystem is complex, but to provide the best possible experience to all our users, Sauce wants to be a Node company to the Node community, a PHP company to the PHP community, a Java company to the Java community, and so on. It’ll be a challenge to find and solve the issues that exist in various projects, contributing our resources congruently with the structures already in place for each project. It’ll be a challenge to write idiomatic, intuitive code for a variety of communities, and prioritize well-organized documentation over a simple drive-by fix. It’ll be a challenge to communicate all the awesome integrations we’re building at Sauce to each community in the manner best received by that community. And that’s why we felt it was essential to have a team focused directly on these goals. So wish us luck, and make sure to let us know if you see an opportunity for a certain language or framework to work more seamlessly with Sauce! Oh, yeah, Sauce is growing fast, and we are actively looking for developers to join this team and help build out its vision! So if working on open source projects in a variety of languages and frameworks sounds interesting to you, and if you’re excited about the idea of making it easier for developers to deliver higher quality faster than ever, head on over to our careers page and check it out.
