Webdev Extravaganza – February 2015

Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla get together to build a physical symbol of our cooperation in the form of a bikeshed. While we thoughtfully determine what color to paint it, 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, or view a recording of the meeting in Air Mozilla. 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.

Peep 2.2 and More Adoption

ErikRose shared news about the release of peep 2.2, which, among other things, adds a progress bar to the install process. He also called out sugardough and AirMozilla, both of which now use peep for installing dependencies.

Pyelasticsearch 1.0 Release

Erik also announced the 1.0 release of pyelasticsearch. The release adds support for modern versions of ElasticSearch, Python 3.x support, and a 15x improvement in speed from optimizations made for DXR.

Snippets Service Significantly Less Fragile

I myself shared news about a recent fix we deployed on the Snippets Service that allows us to send much more data without crashing the service. Previously, we could only send about 1.5 megabytes of snippet data to each user before the service stopped being able to keep up with data transfer, but by pre-generating snippet bundles and sending users redirects to them instead of returning them directly, we were able to send upwards of 4 megabytes with only a 10ms increase in average response time.

badges.mozilla.org Episode IV, A New Hope

lorchard is interested in working on badges.mozilla.org again, and started by modernizing the codebase by switching from vendor submodules to peep + virtualenv, starting to move away from Playdoh, replacing Vagrant and Puppet with Docker and Fig, upgrading the dependencies, and more!

The Continuing Rise of Contribute.json

Peterbe shared the news that mozillians.org and Marketplace both have contribute.json files now. He also shared a list he generated of Webdev websites that still don’t have contribute.json files.

MDN Web Developer Services Survey Results

Hoosteeno wanted to let us know about the release of the results of MDN’s Web Developer Services survey. MDN surveyed over a thousand web developers and asked them what services they use as part of their development. The results will be used to inform work on developer services and is also freely available to anyone else who finds the data useful.

support.mozilla.org on Python 2.7

Mythmon shared a small note about how SUMO is now running on Python 2.7, allowing them to stay up-to-date with the latest Django releases and avoid the oncoming apocalypse of having no version of Django that supports Python 2.6 and is receiving security patches. Get to upgrading, kids!

Scuttling Celebration: Goodbye Scrumbugs!

In a sudden turn of events, pmac called for a Scuttling Celebration to announce the end of ScrumBugz. The website will be taken down by the end of the quarter, as no one seems to be using it anymore.

Open-source Citizenship

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

Mozilla Foundation Client-Side Prototype

Peterbe, on behalf of Pomax, shared the in-development project template for client-side apps being developed by the Mozilla Foundation folks, mofo-example-app. The template aims to implement the wisdom contained in the MoFo Engineering Handbook.

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.

Osmose and Espressive Traded

Though not really new hires, espressive and I have swapped teams, so that I am now on the Engineering Tools team and he is on the Web Productions team. Espressive will be focusing on frontend work for Engagement campaigns, while I’ll be focusing on developing tools and any other engineering work that makes Web Developers at Mozilla happier. Everyone wins!

Roundtable

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

Air Mozilla Contributors Page

Peterbe wanted to share a new page on AirMozilla: the contributor list! A list of contributors is stored in the AirMo settings file, and their info and pictures are pulled from Mozillians and displayed on the site as a way to give thanks for their help. Contributors must opt-in by joining a moderated group on Mozillians as well. Neat!


Unfortunately, the Burgundy and Celadon camps couldn’t come to an agreement in time for us to finish the shed. There’s always next month!

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!