Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla don our VR headsets and connect to our private Minecraft server to work together building giant idols of ourselves for the hoards of cows and pigs we raise to worship as gods. While we build, we 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.

Phonebook now Launches Dialer App

lonnen shared the exciting news that the Mozilla internal phonebook now launches the dialer app on your phone when you click phone numbers on a mobile device. He also warned that anyone who has a change they want to make to the phonebook app should let him know before he forgets all that he had to learn to get this change out.

Open-source Citizenship

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

django-browserid 0.11 is out

I (Osmose) chimed in to share the news that a new version of django-browserid is out. This version brings local assertion verification, support for offline development, support for Django 1.7, and other small fixes. The release is backwards-compatible with 0.10.1, and users on older versions can use the upgrade guide to get up-to-date. You can check out the release notes for more information.

mozUITour Helper Library for Triggering In-Chrome Tours

agibson shared a wrapper around the mozUITour API, which was used in the Australis marketing pages on mozilla.org to trigger highlights for new features within the Firefox user interface from JavaScript running in the web page. More sites are being added to the whitelist, and more features are being added to the API to open up new opportunities for in-chrome tours.

Parsimonious 0.6 (and 0.6.1) is Out!

ErikRose let us know that a new version of Parsimonious is out. Parsimonious is a parsing library written in pure Python, based on formal Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs). You write a specification for the language you want to parse in a notation similar to EBNF, and Parsimonious does the rest.

The latest version includes support for custom rules, which let you hook in custom Python code for handling cases that are awkward or impossible to describe using PEGs. It also includes a @rule decorator and some convenience methods on the NodeVisitor class that simplify the common case of single-visitor grammars.

contribute.json Wants More Prettyness

peterbe stopped by to show of the design changes on the contribute.json website. There’s more work to be done; if you’re interested in helping out with contribute.json, let him know!

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.

Roundtable

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

Leeroy was Broken for a Bit

lonnen wanted to let people know that Leeroy, a service that triggers Jenkins test runs for projects on Github pull requests, was broken for a bit due to accidental deletion of the VM that was running the app. But it’s fixed now! Probably.

Webdev Module Updates

lonnen also shared some updates that have happened to the Mozilla Websites modules in the Mozilla Module System:

• DXR – abbeyj and marcell are now peers.
• MDN – ubernostrum, davidwalsh, shobson, and openjck are now peers.
• Corsica – New module owned by lonnen with mythmon and potch as peers.
• Socorro – lonnen is the new owner.

Static Caching and the State of Persona

peterbe raised a question about the cache timeouts on static assets loaded from Persona by implementing sites. In response, I gave a quick overview of the current state of Persona:

• Along with callahad, djc has been named as co-maintainer, and the two are currently focusing on simplifying the codebase in order to make contribution easier.
• A commitment to run the servers for Persona for a minimum period of time is currently working it’s way through approval, in order to help ease fears that the Persona service will just disappear.
• Mozilla still has a paid operations employee who manages the Persona service and makes sure it is up and available. Persona is still accepting pull requests and will review, merge, and deploy them when they come in. Don’t be shy, contribute!

The answer to peterbe’s original question was “make a pull request and they’ll merge and push!”.

Graphviz graphs in Sphinx

ErikRose shared sphinx.ext.graphviz, which allows you to write Graphviz code in your documentation and have visual graphs be generated from the code. DXR uses it to render flowcharts illustrating the structure of a DXR plugin.

Turns out that building giant statues out of TNT was a bad idea. On the bright side, we won’t be running out of pork or beef any time soon.

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!