Beer and Tell – July 2015

Once a month, web developers from across the Mozilla Project get together to develop an encryption scheme that is resistant to bad actors yet able to be broken by legitimate government entities. While we toil away, we find time to talk about our side projects and drink, an occurrence we like to call “Beer and Tell”.

There’s a wiki page available with a list of the presenters, as well as links to their presentation materials. There’s also a recording available courtesy of Air Mozilla.

Osmose: Moseamp

Osmose (that’s me!) was up first, and shared Moseamp, an audio player. It’s built using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but acts as a native app thanks to the Electron framework. Moseamp can play standard audio formats, and also can load plugins to add support for extra file formats, such as Moseamp-Audio-Overload for playing PSF files and Moseamp-GME for playing NSF and SPC files. The plugins rely on libraries written in C that are compiled via Emscripten.

Peterbe: Activity

Next was Peterbe with Activity, a small webapp that displays the events relevant to a project, such as pull requests, PR comments, bug comments, and more, and displays the events in a nice timeline along with the person related to the action. It currently pulls data from Bugzilla and Github.

The project was born from the need to help track a single individual’s activities related to a project, even if they have different usernames on different services. Activity can help a project maintainer see what contributors are doing and determine if there’s anything they can do to help the contributor.

New One: MXR to DXR

New One was up next with a Firefox add-on called MXR to DXR. The add-on rewrites all links to MXR viewed in Firefox to point to the equivalent page on DXR, the successor to MXR. The add-on also provides a hotkey for switching between MXR and DXR while browsing the sites.

bwalker: Liturgiclock

Last was bwalker who shared liturgiclock, which is a webpage showing a year-long view of what religious texts that Lutherans are supposed to read throughout the year based on the date. The site uses a Node.js library that provides the data on which text belongs to which date, and the visualization itself is powered by SVG and D3.js.


We don’t actually know how to go about designing an encryption scheme, but we’re hoping to run a Kickstarter to pay for the Udacity cryptography course. We’re confident that after being certified as cryptologists we can make real progress towards our dream of swimming in pools filled with government cash.

If you’re interested in attending the next Beer and Tell, sign up for the dev-webdev@lists.mozilla.org mailing list. An email is sent out a week beforehand with connection details. You could even add yourself to the wiki and show off your side-project!

See you next month!