Extravaganza – January 2016

Michael Kelly

Once a month, web developers from across Mozilla get together 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.

Verbatim is Dead! Long Live Pontoon!

First up was Osmose (that’s me!), sharing the exciting news that Verbatim, otherwise known as localize.mozilla.org, has been decommissioned and replaced by Pontoon! Verbatim was an extremely out-of-date instance of the Pootle translation software. Mozilla websites that wish to translate their content are now encouraged to contact the Pontoon team when they want to enable the L10n community to translate their site.

Mozilla.org Dual SHA1/SHA256 Certificate Negotiation

Next was jgmize with info about www.mozilla.org‘s recent work around enabling both SHA1 and SHA256 certificates to be used on the site. Firefox is phasing out support for SHA1 certificates along with the other major browsers, but users on older browsers need to be able to download new versions of Firefox from www.mozilla.org. Some of these older versions are from before browsers supported SHA256 certificates. In order to avoid leaving these users stuck without a way to get a modern browser, www.mozilla.org needs to be able to fall back to SHA1 certificates when necessary.

Happily, www.mozilla.org is now correctly using a SHA256 certificate and falling back to a SHA1 certificate for users whose browser does not support SHA256 certificates, thanks to our CloudFlare CDN.

Peep Now Compatible with Pip 7

ErikRose shared the welcome news that Peep, the wrapper for Pip that supports hash verification of downloaded dependencies, now supports Pip 7 correctly! He also reminded us that pip 8 will obsolete Peep as it will have hash verification built-in.

Web App Developer Initiative Sites

Next was bwalker with a list of websites and tools that the Web App Developer Initiative team shipped in the last quarter:

DXR Updates

ErikRose shared a slew of DXR updates:

  • Recognizing overrides of virtual methods
  • Recognizing multiple directly overridden virtual methods
  • The ability to index Cargo packages
  • Not offering sub/superclass search when none exist

Thanks to Tom Klein and Nick Cameron for these updates!

Open-source Citizenship

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

Product-Details Supports Python 2 and 3 and Django 1.9

Pmac shared the news that django-mozilla-product-details now supports Python 2 and 3 simultaneously, as well as supporting Django 1.9. He also shared the slightly-older news that the library supports optionally storing the data in the database instead of the filesystem.

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.

  • jpetto is switching from a contractor to a full-time web developer on the Engagement Web Development team!
  • davidwalsh is moving to the Web App Developer Initiative team!
  • Osmose is moving to the Support Engineering team working on Input, SUMO, and other projects!

Roundtable

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

Docker Practices for Development

ErikRose closed us out with a few tips for using Docker for developing a website:

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!