Webdev Extravaganza – November 2014

Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla get together to work on a sequel to The Pragmatic Programmer titled The Unhinged Technical Architect. While we argue over the use of oxford commas, we find 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.

New Mozilla.org Pages and The Open Standard

craigcook stopped by to share a bunch of new things that launched from the Web Productions team, including a new mozilla.org homepage and a new contribute page. He also mentioned The Open Standard, which was launched with support from the Web Productions team.

Sites using contribute.json

We heard from peterbe about a new listing of sites with a contribute.json file. The listing pulls info hourly from the contribute.json files for each site in the list. Pull requests are welcome to add more Mozilla sites to the list.

Humble Mozilla Bundle and Voxatron Snippet

Yours truly mentioned the Humble Mozilla Bundle, a promotion with Humble Bundle where we offered several popular games for purchase that can run within a web browser.

To promote the bundle, jgruen and other Mozillians worked with Joseph White to make a minimal port of the Voxatron for use in an about:home snippet. All told, the snippet was about 200kb large and still managed to cram in a full 3d voxel engine that Firefox users were able to play with on their home page.

Open-source Citizenship

Here we talk about libraries we’re maintaining and what, if anything, we need help with for them. Except this week there was nothing shared. Never mind!

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.

Name IRC Nick Role Project
Kristján Oddsson koddsson Volunteer careers.mozilla.org and snippets.mozilla.com

Roundtable

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

configobj

ErikRose wanted to use configobj and asked for opinions on the library. peterbe gave a positive recommendation based on his experience using it in configman.

Tabzilla Update Bar

mythmon wanted to let people know about a new feature in Tabzilla. You can now trigger a feature called the Update Bar, which notifies users on old versions of Firefox that they should update their browser. pmac also called out the Translation Bar, which offers localized versions of the current page to users viewing your site in a language that doesn’t match their preferred locale.

Workweek at Bernie’s

I also gave a reminder about the Webdev meetup happening at the Portland Coincidental Workweek, an event now known as the Workweek at Bernie’s. Follow that link for more details, and if you’re going to be at the workweek and want to attend, contact me to RSVP.


After skimming the back cover of The Pragmatic Programmer, we came up with an outline describing how our book can teach you how to:

  • Fight software;
  • Not just duplicate knowledge, but infinitely copy it for massive gains;
  • Write code so solid and enduring that it will run until AWS randomly kills your box;
  • Encourage programming by fate;
  • Nuke-proof your code using aspect-oriented programming and a few pounds of refrigerator-grade steel;
  • Capture real, living requirements for sale as folk medicine in foreign countries;
  • Test ruthlessly and physically punish any code that misbehaves;
  • Delight your users with micro-transactions;
  • Build teams of slouching young programmers wearing hoodies and jeans to attract investors; and
  • Automate yourself out of a job.

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!