Tomcat's Blog

Hi,

since last month i’m now 7 years at Mozilla as full-time employee \o/

Of course I’m longer around because i started as Community Member in QA years before. And its a long way from my first steps at QA to my current role as Code Sheriff @ Mozilla.

I never actively planned to join the Mozilla Community it just happened 🙂 I worked back in 2001 at a German Email Provider as 2nd Level Support Engineer and as part of my Job (and also to Support Customers) we used different Email Programm’s to find out how to set-up the Programm and so.

Some Friends already involved into OpenSource (some linux fans) pointed me to this Mozilla Programm (at that time M1 or so) and i liked the Idea with this “Nightly”. Having everyday a brand new Program was something really cool and so started my way into the Community without even knowing that i’m now Part of the Community.

So over the years with Mozilla i finally filed my first bug and and was scared like hell (all this new fields in a non-native language) and not really knowing what i signed up when i clicked up this “submit” button in bugzillla 🙂  (was not even sure if i’m NOW supposed to fix the bug 🙂

And now i file dozens of Bugs every day while on Sheriffduty or doing other tasks 🙂

I learned a lot of stuff over the last years and still love being part of Mozilla  and its the best place to work for me! So on to the next years at Mozilla!

– Tomcat

Hi,

since i talked with a lot of people about Sheriffing and what we do here is what a typical day for me look:

We care about the Code Trees like Test Failures etc

I usually start the day with checkin the trees we are responsible for  for test failures using treeherder. This gives me first a overview of the current status and as well make sure that everything is ok for the Asian and European Community which is online at that time.

This Tasks is ongoing till the end of my duty shift. From time to time this means we have to do backouts for code/test regressions.
Beside this i do stuff like checkin-neededs, uplifts etc and other tasks and of course always availble for questions etc on irc 🙂

Also i was thinking about some parts of my day-to-day experience:

Backouts and Tree Closures:

While backouts of code for test failures/bustages etc is one important task of sheriffs (and the managing of tree closures related to this), its always a mixed feeling to backout work from someone (and no one wants to cause a bustage) but its important to ensure quality of our products.

Try Server!!!

Tree Closures due to backouts can have the side effect that others are blocked with checkins. So if in doubt if your patch compile or could cause test regressions, please consider a try run, this helps at lot to keep tree closures for code issues at a minimum.

And last but not least Sheriffing is a Community Task! So if you want to be part of the Sheriff Team as Community Sheriff please sent me a mail at tomcat at mozilla dot com

Thanks!

– Tomcat