Webdev Extravaganza July 2014 Notes

Once a month, web developers across the Mozilla Project get together to talk about the things we’ve shipped, discuss the libraries we’re working on, introduce any new faces, and argue about pointless things. We call it the Webdev Extravaganza! It’s open to the public; you should come next month!

There’s a wiki page that’s mostly useful for pre-meeting connection info and agenda-building, a recording of the meeting, and an etherpad which is a mix of semi-useful info and avant-garde commentary. This month, I’m trying out writing a post-meeting blog post that serves as a more serious log of what was shared during the meeting.

Shipping Celebration

The shipping celebration is for sharing anything that we have shipped in the past month, from incremental updates to our sites to brand new sites to library updates.

Mobile Partners

mobilepartners.mozilla.org is a Mezzanine-based site that allows phone manufacturers and operators to learn about Firefox OS and sign up as a partner. This month we shipped an update that, among other things,  tightens up the site’s Salesforce integration, replaces HTML-based agreements with PDF-based ones displayed via PDF.js, and moves the site off of old Mozilla Labs hardware.

Input

input.mozilla.org got two major features shipped:

  1. All non-English feedback for Firefox OS is now being automatically sent to humans for translation. Having the feedback translated allows processes that work on English only, like Input’s sentiment analysis, to run on feedback from non-English users.
  2. An improved GET API for pulling data from Input, useful primarily for creating interesting dashboards without having to build them into Input itself.

Open Source Citizenship

Peep has an IRC channel

Peep is a wrapper around pip that vets packages downloaded from PyPI via a hash in your requirements file. There’s now an IRC channel for discussing peep development: #peep on irc.mozilla.org.

Spiderflunky

Spiderflunky is a static analysis tool for JavaScript that was modified from a tool for inspecting packaged apps called perfalator. DXR is planning to use it, and there’s interest around the project, so it has it’s own repository now.

New Hires / Interns / Volunteers

This month we have several new interns (including a bunch from the Open Source Lab at OSU):

Name IRC Nick Project
Trevor Bramwell bramwelt crash-stats.mozilla.com
Ian Kronquist muricula input.mozilla.org
Dean Johnson deanj support.mozilla.org
Marcell VazquezChanlatte marcell dxr.mozilla.org
Christian Weiss cweiss Web Components / Brick

Bikeshed / Roundtable

In the interests of time and comprehensibility, open discussions will be ignored.

What does Webdev do?

As part of an ongoing effort to improve webdev, there’s an etherpad for listing the things that webdev does, along with who owns them, what goals they contribute to, and how they can be improved. You are encouraged to take a look and add info or opinions by the end of the week.

Interesting Python Stuff

Erik Rose shared a backport of concurrent.futures from Python 3.2 and a feature from setuptools called entry points that is useful for, among other things, supporting a plugin architecture in your library.


Did you find this post useful? Let us know and we might do it again next month!

Until then, STAY INCLUSIVE, KIDS