Jari Bakken
Newsroom Engineer at VG - Verdens Gang AS
Oslo, Norway
Summary
🤩
RockstarJari Bakken is a newsroom engineer in Oslo with 17 years of experience building data-driven journalism tools, editorial platforms, and backend systems. He combines hands-on full‑stack work (Node.js, React/Next.js, Python, R, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Docker/k8s, cloud) with a strong focus on data journalism, ML-driven workflows and newsroom tooling. Previously he led engineering for Norway’s fact‑checking site Faktisk.no and built parliamentary watchdog systems, bringing product-minded technical leadership to civic and media projects. An active open-source contributor, Jari has shaped major Ruby projects (Selenium, Watir, rubinius, ruby/spec) and improved integrations in projects like LangChainJS and spaCy, reflecting deep expertise in testing, automation and language tooling. He’s comfortable across the stack from high‑quality test suites and language bindings to production APIs and editorial UIs, and often bridges journalist requirements with robust engineering solutions. Notably, his long-term stewardship of Ruby WebDriver bindings and test automation work has quietly influenced how browser automation is used in both testing and newsroom automation.
17 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
6,038reputation
487kreached
72answers
1question
ruby
top-5%
firefox
top-5%
selenium-webdriver
top-1%
google-chrome
top-5%
java
top-5%
selenium
top-1%
Github Skills (70)
programming-language10
postgresql10
python10
testing10
cffi10
web-automation10
ruby10
foreign10
ffi10
xpath10
javascript10
webdriver10
feature-toggle10
feature-flags10
html10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
watir/watir
Aug 2009 - Mar 2015
Watir Powered By Selenium
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1325 commits, 7 PRs, 17 pushes in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Jari appears to be contributing to the Watir project, a Ruby-based web automation framework. Their contributions focus on implementing and testing new features and improvements related to element interactions, particularly within the browser's core functionalities. Specifically, the commits reveal work on adding functionality for drag-and-drop, support for data attributes, handling of HTML5 elements, and enhancements to existing features such as options selection within select lists. The user has made changes to the element locators as well as the elements themsleves.
rubyselenium-webdrivercapybarasketchupwatir
SeleniumHQ/selenium
Oct 2009 - Oct 2021
A browser automation framework and ecosystem.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1299 commits, 2 pushes, 2 comments in 12 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Jari's contributions primarily focused on implementing Ruby bindings and related features for the Selenium project, specifically targeting Internet Explorer. They were responsible for adding support for features such as cookie management, setting browser visibility, and interacting with elements. Their work also included the addition of utilities, error handling, and general bridge functionality necessary for interfacing with the IEDriver.
dotnetpythonbrowserjavascriptruby
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