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.

Git Submodules are Gone from MDN

First up was jezdez with news about MDN moving away from using git submodules to pull in dependencies. Instead, MDN now uses pip to pull in dependencies during deployment. Hooray!

Careers now on AWS/Deis

Next was giorgos who let us know that careers.mozilla.org has moved over to the Engagement Engineering Deis cluster on AWS. For deployment, the site has Travis CI build a Docker image and run tests against it. If the tests pass, the image is deployed directly to Deis. Neat!

Privacy Day

jpetto helped ship the Privacy Day page. It includes a mailing list signup form as well as instructions for several platforms on how to update your software to stay secure.

Automated Functional Testing for Mozilla.org

agibson shared news about the migration of previously-external functional tests for mozilla.org to live within the Bedrock repository itself. This allows us to run the tests, which previously were run by the WebQA team against live environments, whenever the site is deployed to dev, stage, or production. Having the functional tests be a part of the build pipeline ensures that developers are aware when the tests are broken and can fix them before deploying broken features. A slide deck is available with more details.

Peep 3.x

ErikRose shared news about the 3.0 (and 3.1) release of Peep, which helps smooth the transition from Peep to Pip 8, which now supports hashed requirements natively. The new Peep includes a peep port command for porting Peep-compatible requirements files to the new Pip 8 format.

Open-source Citizenship

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

Jazzband

jezdez shared news about JazzBand, a cooperative experiment to reduce the stress of maintaining Open Source software alone. The group operates as a Github organization that anyone can join and transfer projects to. Anyone in the JazzBand can access JazzBand projects, allowing projects that would otherwise die due to lack of activity thrive thanks to the community of co-maintainers.

Notable projects already under the JazzBand include django-pipeline and django-configurations. The group is currently focused on Python projects and is still figuring out things like how to secure releases on PyPI.

django-configurations 1.0

Speaking of the JazzBand, members of the collective pushed out the 1.0 release of django-configurations, which is an opinionated library for writing class-based settings files for Django. The new release adds Django 1.8+ support as well as several new features.

Roundtable

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

Travis CI Sudo for Specific Environments

Next was ErikRose with an undocumented tip for Travis CI builds. As seen on the LetsEncrypt travis.yml, you can specify sudo: required for a specific entry in the build matrix to run only that build on Travis’ container-based infrastructure.

Docker on OS X via xhyve

Erik also shared xhyve, which is a lightweight OS X hypervisor. It’s a port of bhyve, and can be used as the backend for running Docker containers on OS X instead of VirtualBox. Recent changes that have made this more feasible include the removal of a 3 gigabyte RAM limit and experimental NFS support that, according to Erik, is faster than VirtualBox’s shared folder functionality. Check it out!

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!