I'm borrowing the title of a famous post by patio11, because I clearly hate having google juice because it's good and touches on similar points to my former colleague Mark Gardner recently made. (See what I did there, cross site linking! Maybe I don't hate having google juice after all...)

Anyways, he mentioned that despite having a sprint fail, he still learned a lot of good stuff. This happens a lot as a software developer and you need to be aware of this to ensure you maximize your opportunities to take something positive away from everything you work on.

On that note, I had a similar thing happen to me this week with playwright-perl. It turns out I didn't have to write a custom server with express to expose the Playwright API to Perl. The Playwright team have a command line program which talks on stdin/stdout to do these RPC calls for their python and go clients.

The reason I didn't know about it was that it is not documented! The only reason I found out was due to hopping into the Playwright slack and getting some good feedback from one of the Playwright devs.

This might seem like I did a bunch of work for no reason, and now have to do expensive re-tooling. I actually don't have to do anything if I don't want to. My approach seems to work quite well as-is. That said, even when I do replace it (as this will be good from a maintenance POV), the existing code can be re-used to make one of the things I really want. Namely, a selenium server built with playwright.

This would give me all the powerful new features, reliability and simpler setup that traditional Selenium servers don't have. Furthermore, (if it catches on) it means the browser vendors can stop worrying about releasing buggy selenium driver binaries and focus on making sure their devToolsProtocols are top-shelf. (Spoiler alert: This is one of the secret reasons I wrote Selenium::Client.)

This also shouldn't be too much of a hurdle, given I have machine-readable specs for both APIs, which means it's just a matter of building the needed surjections. Famous last words eh? Should make for an interesting Q3 project in any case.