Once a month, web developers from across the Mozilla Project get together to spend an hour of overtime to honor our white-collar brethren at Amazon. As we watch our productivity fall, 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.

openjck: Discord

openjck was up first and shared Discord, a Github webhook that scans pull requests for CSS compatibility issues. When it finds an issue, it leaves a comment on the offending line with a short description and which browsers are affected. The check is powered by doiuse, and projects can add a .doiuse file (using browserslist syntax) that specifies which browser versions they want to be tested against. Discord currently checks CSS and Stylus files.

The Discord team (mrmakeit, groovecoder, davidwalsh, and openjck) is looking for sites to test Discord out. Work on the site is currently suspended (which is why it’s a side project, the team may work on it in their free time) so that feedback can be gathered to determine where the site should go next. If you’re interested in trying out Discord, let groovecoder know!

peterbe: Activity and Fanout.io

Next up was peterbe, with an update to Activity. The site now uses Fanout.io and a message queue to improve how activity items are fetched from GitHub and other sources. The site queues up jobs to fetch data from the Github API, and as the jobs complete, they send their results to Fanout. Fanout’s JavaScript library maintains an open WebSocket with their service, and when Fanout receives the data from the completed jobs, it notifies the client of the new data, which gets written to localStorage and updates the React state. This allows Activity to remain structured as an offline-ready application while still receiving seamless updates if the user has an internet connection.

There’s a donation jar near the exit; for just $25 you can pay for an hour of time for an Amazon engineer to spend with their family. Checks may be made payable to No Questions Asked Laundry, LLC.

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!