As you can see, since I started I have been quite busy: http://www.tjmaher.com/p/programming-projects.html ... This is the result of me locking myself away many a weekend in our home office. Thank you, Melissa, for your continued support and encouragement for me continuing my weird little side-projects these past ten years.
Blogging for me is part of the learning process. I tend to document as I go, creating toy projects to deepen what I am learning on the job. It's where I figure things out, experiment with various test automation strategies on the weekend so I can demo it on the weekday and excitedly solicit feedback from the dev team.
Summer of 2016, I finally found and joined a local software testing group. By October 2016, I gave my first public presentation to it. And when the group rebranded itself the Ministry of Testing - Boston, I ended up running it! I finally had to step back from it in 2024. Along the way I've spoken at TestGuild and AutomationGuild, contributed a chapter to Continuous Testing for DevOps Professionals, and created the Introduction to Capybara course for Test Automation University. I have an upcoming TestGuild talk in April 2026 on Building a React Native Mobile Automation Framework with Detox + TypeScript.
When was the last time I read a book? A real book? One that wasn't software related?
Hrm.
About T.J. Maher:
Nice to meet you! I'm Thomas F. Maher, Jr. Call me T.J.!. I'm a Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) specializing in building web, mobile, and API automated test frameworks - from initial proof-of-concept through CI/CD integration, reporting, and team mentoring and training. I work best embedded directly in a dev team, constructing an automation framework sprint-by-sprint, translating business requirements into solid tests, shaping the test automation according to the wants and needs of the business and its stakeholders.
I started my automation development career back in 2015 at Fitbit-Boston, spending two years building the automation test framework for their eCommerce application using Selenium WebDriver + Java. Over the past decade I've worked writing test automation for mobile (Detox + TypeScript, Appium + Java), browser (Selenium WebDriver, Playwright, Capybara + Ruby), and API layers across health tech, cloud security, and eCommerce. You can see more on what I have been working on in the Programming Projects section.
I've also been incorporating AI-assisted development into my workflow - using GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor, and the Playwright Test Generator.
Software development for me is a team sport. The relationship between a developer and a software tester shouldn't be like an artist and an art critic. It should be like the relationship between a writer and a copy-editor, working together to make a quality product. That collaborative instinct shows up in everything - writing READMEs that help teammates unfamiliar with the framework, detailed Confluence documentation highlighting how automation is progressing, presenting framework walkthroughs to company QA guilds.
I've been writing about software testing and automation since 2016 - for TechBeacon, SmartBear, Medium, and the Threat Stack engineering blog, as well as here. Topics have ranged from breaking into automation development, surviving coding interviews, and building test frameworks one sprint at a time, to how testers and developers can actually work well together.
More recently I've been writing on LinkedIn Pulse about AI-assisted development — specifically what happens when you hand GitHub Copilot the keys to a Playwright framework and see what comes out. A full list of articles, talks, and courses is at tjmaher.com/p/media.html.
The most important part about me you should know: I absolutely love what I do. I love figuring things out. Collaborating with people. Bouncing ideas off teammates. Figuring out the cracks in the software process, the edge cases. There is nothing better than finally figuring out at 2:00 am on a Saturday how to reproduce a bug that had been nagging the team all week. My job is a lot of fun!
I am a former gung-ho assistant organizer (2008–2010) for the Nerd Fun Meetup group, once running four or five events a week, going to lectures technological, scientific and historical all around the Cambridge / Boston area. I met my wife through the group, and we still bounce around Boston with friends that we have made there.
Feel like dropping me a line? I am @tjmaher1 on LinkedIn, BlueSky, Twitter, Medium, Dev.to, and I'm on YouTube.
Talk to you later! And Happy Testing!