Webdev Extravaganza – September 2014

Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla gather to continue work on our doomsday robot that will force the governments of the world to relinquish control of the internet to us. Crafting robotic monsters is hard work, so we take frequent breaks to avoid burnout, and we find these breaks are a convenient time to talk about the work that we’ve shipped, share the libraries we’re working on, meet new folks, and talk about whatever else is on our minds. It’s the Webdev Extravaganza! The meeting is open to the public; you should stop by!

You can check out the wiki page that we use to organize the meeting, view a recording of the meeting in Air Mozilla, or attempt to decipher the aimless scrawls that are the meeting notes. Or just read on for a summary!

Shipping Celebration

The shipping celebration is for anything we finished and deployed in the past month, whether it be a brand new site, an upgrade to an existing one, or even a release of a library.

Marketplace Redesign

clouserw stopped by to tell us that Firefox Marketplace shipped a redesign! The front page now has a set of modules that can be customized using a set of admin tools, including changing what apps are shown, setting colors and features, and more. Of particular note is the fact that the admin interface for the modules was given a lot of UX attention as well (as opposed to our standard practice of using the default Django admin design), and includes a live preview of what the modules will look like.

Socorro: Out of Memory Crashes and new ADI source

lonnen informs us that Socorro has landed support for logging out-of-memory crashes, meaning that crashes that are suspected of relating to memory now include about:memory logs in the crash data, to help us diagnose those problems. In addition, Socorro is now fetching data about the number of active daily instances of Firefox instead of depending on the data being sent to Socorro in bulk. Socorro uses this data to normalize crash data, and the new source reduces the time spent pulling in the data to under ten minutes.

Air Mozilla now supports pop-out videos

peterbe shared the news that Air Mozilla now supports pop-out videos, meaning you can now launch a new window with the video you want to watch. This gives the viewer more options in how to watch a video while working on something else, as previously you were limited to in-page viewing or full-screen viewing.

Open-source Citizenship

Here we talk about libraries we’re maintaining and what, if anything, we need help with for them.

contribute.json

peterbe had a few pieces of news about contribute.json. First, Air Mozilla and Peekaboo both have live contribute.json files, and Socorro is deploying one soon. Second,  seanbolton and espressive are working on a redesign of the contribute.json webpage. And finally, the validator now supports text and file upload as well as URLs.

New Hires / Interns / Volunteers / Contributors

Here we introduce any newcomers to the Webdev group, including new employees, interns, volunteers, or any other form of contributor. Unfortunately we had no one new to introduce this month.

Roundtable

The Roundtable is the home for discussions that don’t fit anywhere else.

Markeplace in multiple datacenters

clouserw shared an “exploration” he’s working on for moving Marketplace into being hosted in multiple datacenters. While the primary goals are redundancy (if a datacenter goes down) and performance (geographically close to users who normally have to reach servers in the US), one major issue that was raised was handling differing privacy laws between countries that we have datacenters in. Feedback is welcome!

Bedrock running on Cloud9

jgmize wanted to let everyone know that Bedrock can now be set up on Cloud9, allowing developers and contributors to get a running instance of Bedrock with almost no interaction or software installed on their own machine. There’s a quickstart guide for setting it up, and he’s looking for people to try it out and also to consider trying out the model on their own projects as a way of helping on-board new contributors.


If you’re curious, the robot is coming along nicely. Once we’re able to get the imported railgun to clear customs, we should be good to go!

If you’re interested in web development at Mozilla, or want to attend next month’s Extravaganza, subscribe to the dev-webdev@lists.mozilla.org mailing list to be notified of the next meeting, and maybe send a message introducing yourself. We’d love to meet you!

See you next month!