Extravaganza – June 2015

Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla get together to plot which C-level executive we’re going to take out next. Meanwhile, 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.

Lazy-loading Fonts on MDN

First up was shobson with news about lazy-loading CSS fonts on MDN. The improvement allows users to see content immediately and avoids text flashing associated with displaying the fonts after they’ve loaded. The pull request is available for review for anyone interested in how it was achieved.

Lazy-loading Tabzilla on Air Mozilla

Next was peterbe, who told us about how Air Mozilla is now lazy-loading Tabzilla, the white Mozilla tab at the top of many of our websites. By not loading the extra code for the tab until the rest of the page has loaded, they were able to reduce the load time of the initial document by 0.7 seconds. Check out the bug for more info.

ContributeBot

pmac stopped by to show off ContributeBot, an Hubot script that reads contribute.json files and welcomes new visitors when the channel is quiet with information from the file. It gives new users info about where to find documentation, as well as pinging important people in the project to let them know that there’s someone new.

Open-source Citizenship

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

pyelasticsearch 1.3

ErikRose wanted to let people know that pyelasticsearch 1.3 is out. It now has HTTPS support as well as new constructor arguments that help reduce the number of times you repeat yourself while using the library.

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 Role Work
Gloria Dwomoh Outreachy Intern Air Mozilla
Michael Nolan Intern Air Mozilla
Peter Elmers Intern DXR

This was a… productive 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!