Adventures with Python and Selinium: Coursera Edition(s)

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In my efforts to improve, I have decided once again to dive deep into learning all things tech.  Inspired by my recent auto mechanic adventure, I recently changed brakes and spark plugs on my car, I have realized that with enough confidence and time, I too can improve my tech skills once more.  Which brings me to my latest goal of pivoting my career path towards QA Testing and Automation.  

A bit of background, back in the day I used to sharpen my skills regularly using Lynda.com.  Although there are remnants of what that site used to be on LinkedIn Learning, the quality of tutorials and the focus was no longer there.  The bleeding edge teachers were replaced by corporate tutorials that lacked all the influential drive and energy.  Perhaps this is an old man yelling at the sky moment, but its clear that quality of tutorials have gone down the drain, regardless if it is free or paid.  

Firefox logo - WikipediaFile:Selenium Logo.png - Wikimedia CommonsFile:Python-logo-notext.svg - Wikimedia ...


Nevertheless, things brings us to the current state of affairs, Coursera.  I started with a QA Testing and Automation course that stated that I can use Python, only for the teacher in the video to explain, "we are going to use Javascript with NPM".  With that said, I immediately searched for an alternative course and found an intro to Python and Selenium.  Not to sound petty, but I paid 200+ dollars for this service, at least have it organized properly.  In any case, once I got into the intro course, I noticed that the quality of the video drastically changed.  The original Javascript based tutorial had a higher production value.  The Python based course appeared more 1 step above a Zoom call.  Regardless of the production value, the content itself appears to be solid....so far.   

With all of the headache of setting things up and bouncing between multiple tutorials and Googling extra installation steps, I was finally able to get Firefox, Python, Selenium and Visual Studio Code working together.  Originally I wanted to go full on with keeping things more open source by using VSCodium, but I ran into too many issues when attempting to use the debugging extension.  Perhaps I missed a step or something, but I would rather keep chugging along.  Below is a quick video of what my test scripts have accomplished, specifically to grab the website title information.   

 


 

 

 

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