TestNerds for Selenium
NFTs prove to be even more interesting in the new year. Here is the latest on my little experiment to explore NFTs and showcase TestNerds. In the past weeks, I’ve seen bugs in NFT infrastructure, upset some folks, and minted a few more NFTs for 2022 to celebrate a nerdy test infrastructure release. Many folks don’t understand NFTs, or are just now understanding some of the implications. This post shares experiences at the intersection of testing and NFTs.
Late last year I created some NFTs for TestNerds, based on folks I knew and was sure would think it interesting and fun. I then created some additional NFTs to bring visibility to other interesting people in the testing field that I knew of but hadn’t really met. But I wanted to bring visibility to their contributions to the world of testing ideas.
At first, the comments rolled in that people were happy being enshrined in an NFT and said “thanks!”, “I’m honored!”, and “Awesome!”. Some didn’t know much of NFTs beforehand or had only heard the term, and they said things like “Oh, cool, these are like collectible baseball cards”. Importantly, they were cool with it — at first. Then came the flames! Yes, I was wrong and humbled.
I deliberately hadn’t asked folks for permission to create an NFT in their honor. A couple of folks felt I shouldn’t have done this without talking to them first. I deliberately hadn’t asked, because I’m #1 lazy, #2 it wouldn't scale to creating a lot of NFT’s, especially for people who are no longer living. The problems started when they asked me to remove their NFTs. Firstly, even Google has had to deal with the ‘right to be forgotten’ — you can’t really delete an image from the internet. Curiously, the images weren’t really theirs (I’d paid someone to create cute 8-bit versions of public photos), and these folks had voluntarily published the original images on many conference websites, so asking for privacy seemed odd, but fair enough. Regardless, they were right, I should’ve asked first, and if they aren’t interested in someone trying to link to the work they’ve previously shared, all good.
Of course, I rushed to the NFT minting and discovery site opensea.io to delete those NFTs from the TestNerds collection while the angry DMs were coming in. This whole exercise being test-related, of course, I had to hit an interesting bug: I was faced with an infinite spinner after hitting the delete button. Oh boy, I was stressed and sweating now…
Regardless of technical facts or ‘digital rights’, if people are unhappy, they are unhappy.
One tweet really captures a broad range of angst about NFTs. Fear of new technology — I often forget there are folks like that. The assumption that NFT’s are a ‘scam’ — implying that this is a money-making scheme of mine. The whole point of NFTs is that they involve money, and they have a minimum price of .005 ETH sale price on that marketplace. Maybe making $2 after about an hour of effort is a good use of time for some, its not in my plans ;) The reply even demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the Internet (EFF) — the EFF would gladly say I didn’t have to take anything down, and I own the artwork. This reply probably won't age well. Some people are also just negative and ‘mean’. Hmph.
Worse, I was hit with accusations of destroying the planet. Really. Crypto has a bad ‘rap’ for using a lot of electricity, which implies a large carbon footprint. Much has been written about this elsewhere, but the concern got me looking into it. The estimates of the cost of minting an NFT, an Etherium transaction, range widely, but it is also interesting that the complaining tweets burned some carbon. I actually minted using Polygon, not Etherium, which uses less than a dime of electricity at worst, but no one reads. Of course, one of these folks took a flight from the US to Europe for a testing conference a couple of days later (986 kg CO2).
These are the worst-case estimates for Etherium carbon footprints I could find. True, not a great thing. I’m not an apologist, but Etherium is switching to proof of stake this year, which is estimated to reduce this cost one-thousand-fold — ironically down to the cost of a tweet. Crypto is a fast-moving and ever-changing technology. This is exactly the type of data this project was intended to discover and share.
I buried the lead! Some TestNerds at test.ai created a new, free, SDK for Selenium that adds magical backup, and AI-first selectors. I’ve added them to the TestNerds collection — after asking their permission first of course.
Here are the Selenium SDK TestNerd NFTs — on sale now as part of my money-making scheme! I’ve even NFT’d the Twitter response above for future generations.
Note on pricing: the first set of TestNerd NFTs was priced at the lowest possible price on the platform, about $20 at the time. The last set was priced at $100 just to test things out and it felt odd to sell something for $20 when the transaction fee was at almost $200. So, in this set, I’ve set the pricing at $200 to make the transaction fee a bit less significant. And, perhaps rising prices might make the originals worth more. NFTs are a mix of code, markets, and money. I’ll share any findings on price changes if any.
More TestNerds coming soon, and probably more ruffled feathers :)
— Jason Arbon
