What are the odds? As a kid I was terrified by an episode of The Simpsons where Homer is served a fugu fish, whose lethal toxins need to be expertly removed before it can be eaten. The chef gets distracted, Homer is served the wrong part of the fish, and he spends rest of the…
Assembling the pieces needed to turn our scripts into an efficient engine. It feels like we’re on the cusp of having something here, you know? We have a handful of scripts that can do all of our basic operations, but it still feels a little disorganized. If we wanted to re-structure our existing functions, where…
Now that we have a structure in place, lets see what other functions we can add. What is a website? What components make up a website? What do we do with websites? Take a moment to go back into that developer tools window in your web browser (Right click -> inspect, or F12). What type…
Last time we were able to make a script that searches for and opens up a webpage. Handy, but each “action” that we do takes a couple of functions. Can we change this into organized behaviors and make it more reusable? All of our code so far has been organized into a main class. This…
The value of having good bug-side manners. It’s not working. That button that was working last week – today it’s broken. You spent a whole day updating configuration files and setting up your computer and now, after that new build, the key feature for the next release is totally broken. It always happens to you,…
Adding Selenium to a Java project with Maven and automating web page interactions. So far we have a Java project using Maven running inside of Visual Studio. We know how it works, how to change it, and how to run the program. Lets get started on making it do something cool. Installing Selenium Webdriver For…
Want to learn how to brush your teeth? First you’ll need to learn how to program a computer. Wake up – 3:59 AM. You always tell people you rise and grind before 4. You stretch your shoulders, stretch your wrists, stretch your fingers. You can’t afford getting Carpel Tunnel Syndrome. You jog to your ergonomic…
Installing Java, a compiler, and a running a project in a windows environment. Installing Java Java is a very popular programming language, but why do so many people use it? It’s considered “high-level“, meaning that it doesn’t require “low-level” knowledge of the operations of a computer to use. But Java has a syntax similar to…