Once a month, web developers from across the Mozilla Project get together to upvote stories on Hacker News from each of our blogs. While we’re together, we usually end up sharing a bit about our side projects over beers, which is why we call this meetup “Beer and Tell”.
There’s a wiki page available with a list of the presenters, as well as links to their presentation materials. There’s also a recording available courtesy of Air Mozilla.
Frederik Braun: Room Availability in the Berlin Office
freddyb shared (via a ghost presentation by yours truly) a small webapp he made that shows the current availability of meeting rooms in the Mozilla Berlin office. The app reads room availability from Zimbra, which Mozilla uses for calendaring and booking meeting rooms. It also uses moment.js for rendering relative dates to let you know when a room will be free.
The discussion following the presentation brought up a few similar apps that other Mozilla offices had made to show off their availability, such as the Vancouver office’s yvr-conf-free and the Toronto office’s yyz-conf-free.
Nigel Babu: hgstats
nigelb shared (via another ghost presentation, this time split between myself and laura) hgstats, which shows publicly-available graphs of the general health of Mozilla’s mercurial servers. This includes CPU usage, load, swap, and more. The main magic of the app is to load images from graphite, which are publicly visible, while graphite itself isn’t.
nigelb has offered a bounty of beer for anyone who reviews the app code for him.
Pomax: Inkcyclopedia
Pomax shared an early preview of Inkcyclopedia, an online encyclopedia of ink colors. Essentially, Pomax bought roughly 170 different kinds of ink, wrote down samples with all of them, photographed them, and then collected those images along with the kind of ink used for each. Once finished, the site will be able to accept user-submitted samples and analyze them to attempt to identify the color and associate it with the ink used. Unsurprisingly, the site is able to do this using the RGBAnalyse library that Pomax shared during the last Beer and Tell, in tandem with RgbQuant.js.
Sathya Gunasekaran: screen-share
gsathya shared a screencast showing off a project that has one browser window running a WebGL game and sharing its screen with another browser window via WebRTC. The demo currently uses Chrome’s desktopCapture API for recording the screen before sending it to the listener over WebRTC.
Alas, we were unable to beat Hacker News’s voting ring detection. But at least we had fun!
If you’re interested in attending the next Beer and Tell, sign up for the dev-webdev@lists.mozilla.org mailing list. An email is sent out a week beforehand with connection details. You could even add yourself to the wiki and show off your side-project!
See you next month!