Ryan Roemer - Backbone.js Testing

Ryan Roemer is the Director of Engineering at Curiosity Media, a language learning startup, where he manages technical operations and leads the development team. He develops (and tests) full-stack JavaScript applications and backend Node.js services. He also works with data mining, cloud architectures, and problems related to large scale distributed systems.

He was previously an engineer in the cloud computing storage group of Microsoft's Azure platform and most recently developed the search and cloud architecture for IP Street, a patent data mining startup. Besides engineering, he is a registered patent attorney (inactive), although it has been a long time since he has put on his lawyer hat.

You can find him online at http://loose-bits.com and on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ryan_roemer.

This book simply would not have been possible without the open source community, which has contributed to all the pieces of technology we have discussed in this book. In particular, the Backbone.js community's commitment to documentation, tutorials, and guides allows the rest of the Web to keep up with the amazingly rapid evolution of the Backbone.js library and ecosystem.

I would like to thank the JavaScript developer communities in the District of Columbia and Seattle, WA, for their incidental feedback, chats, and ideas throughout the development of the book. Additionally, I owe a debt of gratitude to the book's technical reviewers, as they put up with some quite rough early drafts of chapters, provided immensely useful feedback, and helped shepherd the book to its final form.

Finally, my most heartfelt thanks and love to my wife, Robin. Your support and help through the late nights, weekends, and a hectic cross-country move has been truly indispensible.

Casey Foster is a full-stack web developer born and raised in Southern California and now residing in Texas. He has been drawn towards web development since his early teens and has found a passion for JavaScript in the browser and on the server side with Node.js. He is a huge fan of open source projects and tries to open source as many of his projects as possible. He is a core contributor to the popular Backbone.js library and an active supporter of many other open source repositories. In early 2013, he co-authored his first book on Backbone.js, titled Developing a Backbone.js Edge . He can be found on GitHub and Twitter as caseywebdev.

I would like to thank my wife Lacey and my puppy Gunner for their love and support in everything I do.

Jim Newbery is a web developer based in Edinburgh, Scotland, with a 17-year history of mostly building terrible websites and web applications. Once excited by being able to make text blink on a screen, he now spends his time working for the fantasy sports website FanDuel.com, tinkering with the usual plethora of half-finished side projects, and teaching his daughter how to make animated gifs of kittens.

I'd like to thank all those developers that give up hours and hours of personal time to contribute to open source software projects that make my working life easier and more enjoyable. Thanks, in particular, go to Jeremy Ashkenas, TJ Holowaychuk, and Christian Johansen for creating the libraries and tools used in this book.