Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla get together to dumpster dive for hardware to add to our in-house cloud computing service. While we argue about the compute power of TI-83s, we find time to talk about the work 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 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.
DXR search package for Atom
First up was Osmose (that’s me!) with a package for Atom, a text editor made by Github. The package is called atom-dxr-search and lets you perform searches on DXR (Mozilla’s structured code search engine) from directly within your text editor. And, if you have the code tree you’re searching open as a directory in Atom, you can click on the results to open the matching file and jump directly to the line in question!
Socorro: Now on AWS!
Next was lonnen, who shared the great news that Socorro, the crash collector service that handles crash reports for Firefox and other products, has successfully migrated off of Mozilla infrastructure and on to AWS. This is the culmination of 2-3 quarters of work by the Socorro team, and will allow the team to scale and deploy much faster than before.
Along with the switch itself, the team set up several new tools to help deploy and monitor the service, including Atlas, which lets the team to audit and test infrastructure changes before they get deployed.
Air Mozilla /new page
Peterbe launched the New/Upload page on Air Mozilla, which lets users to upload existing videos or record a new video from their webcam. The page makes it much easier to submit content to Air Mozilla, and in the future the page will allow you to record screencasts as well.
DXR 2.0 Demo
ErikRose shared a link to his presentation on the new things coming in the DXR 2.0 update, as well as a link to the post-presentation discussion on what the future roadmap for DXR looks like.
Edwin, a tool for bug management
Mythmon has been working on Edwin, which is a small React app that lets you manage the list of bugs to work on for a project. It pulls data from both Bugzilla and GitHub, knows the current review status of a bug, and lets you to sort and prioritize work easily. SUMO and Input are currently using the tool to manage their work, and any projects interested in trying the tool out can contact mythmon to get their project added.
Pontoon on Heroku
I wrapped things up with the news that Pontoon, a localization service that supports in-page translation for websites, has migrated to Heroku. The jump is the result of work from both myself and mathjazz, the main developer of the site. The migration required upgrading Django from 1.4 to 1.8, replacing Git submodules with a peep-compatible requirements file, replacing jingo with django-jinja, and a slew of other changes generally around removing the last traces of playdoh from the site.
In addition, the Pontoon team is looking to help anyone interested in switching to Pontoon. If you’re not using Pontoon and want to be (and you should), let me know and I’ll be able to help start the process as well as possibly contribute patches to your site to enable in-page localization.
In the end we weren’t able to find enough computers, so we opted to install rootkits on all the company laptops that harvest unused CPU for our cloud.
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!