Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla get together to see who can score the highest car emissions rating. While we scour the world for dangerous combustibles, 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.

One and Done on Heroku

First up was bsilverberg with the news that One and Done, Mozilla’s contributor task board, has successfully migrated from the Mozilla-hosted Stackato PAAS to Heroku. One and Done takes advantage of a few interesting features of Heroku, such as App Pipelines and Review Apps.

Pontoon Sync Improvements and New Leaderboards

Next was Osmose (that’s me!) sharing a few new features on Pontoon, a site for submitting translations for Mozilla software:

• mathjazz added a new “Latest Activity” column to project and locale listings.
• jotes added time-based filters to the leaderboard as well as several performance improvements to the page.
• I added inc file support to the new sync process, as well as a few other fixes such that all Pontoon projects are now using the new sync. Yay!

Air Mozilla iTunes Video Podcast

Peterbe stopped by to share the news that Air Mozilla now has an iTunes-compatible podcast feed for all of its videos. The feed has already been approved by Apple and is available on the iTunes Store.

DXR Static File Cachebusting

ErikRose shared the news that DXR now adds hashes to static file filenames so that updates to the static files don’t get messed up by an old local cache. Interestingly, instead of relying on popular tools like Grunt or Webpack, Erik opted to implement the hashing using some logic in a Makefile plus a little bit of Python. You can check out the pull request to see the details of the change.

Replacing localForage with localStorage

Next we went back to Peterbe, who recently replaced localForage, a library that abstracts several different methods of storing data locally in the browser, with localStorage, the blocking, built-in storage solution that ships with browsers. He also shared a blog post that showed that not only is localStorage simpler to use, it was actually faster in his specific use case.

Mozilla.org Hosted on Deis

Next was jgmize sharing the news that mozilla.org is now hosted on a Deis cluster. Currently a small amount of production data is being hosted by the cluster, but a larger rollout is planned for the near future. Giorgos is responsible for the entire Jenkins setup, including a neat deployment pipeline display, an Ansible playbook, and the deployment pipeline scripts. Pmac ported over hundreds of Apache redirects to Python and wrote a comprehensive set of tests for them as well.

Roundtable

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

Farewell to Wenzel

Lastly, I wanted to specifically call out wenzel, whose last day as a paid contributor for Mozilla was last Friday. Wenzel has been a Mozillian for 9 years, starting as an intern. He’s contributed to almost every major Mozilla web property, and will be missed.

This month’s winner was willkg, with an impressive 200% rating, generating more pollution than the fuel he put in. Local science expert Dr. Potch of Mr. Potch’s Questionable Ethics and Payday Loan Barn was quoted as saying that willkg’s score was “possible”.

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!