Beer and Tell – April 2016

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

emceeaich: Memory Landscapes

First up was emceeaich, who shared Memory Landscapes, a visual memoir of the life and career of artist and photographer Laurie Toby Edison. The project is presented as a non-linear collection of photographs, in contrast to the traditionally linear format of memoirs. The feature that emceeaich demoed was “Going to Brooklyn”, which gives any link a 1/5 chance of showing shadow pictures briefly before moving on to the linked photo.

lorchard: DIY Keyboard Prototype

Next was lorchard, who talked about the process of making a DIY keyboard using web-based tools. He used keyboard-layout-editor.com to generate a layout serialized in JSON, and then used Plate & Case Builder to generate a CAD file for use with a laser cutter.

A flickr album is available with photos of the process.

lorchard: Jupyter Notebooks in Space

lorchard also shared eve-market-fun, a Node.js-based service that pulls data from the EVE Online API and pre-digests useful information about it. He then uses a Jupyter notebook to pull data from the API and analyze it to guide his market activities in the game. Neat!

Pomax: React Circle-Tree Visualizer

Pomax was up next with a new React component: react-circletree! It depicts a tree structure using segmented concentric circles. The component is very configurable and can by styled with CSS as it is generated via SVG. While built as a side-project, the component can be seen in use on the Web Literacy Framework website.

Pomax: HTML5 Mahjong

Also presented by Pomax was an HTML5 multiplayer Mahjong game. It allows four players to play the classic Chinese game online by using socket.io and a Node.js server to connect the players. The frontend is built using React and Webpack.

groovecoder and John Dungan: Codesy

Last up was groovecoder and John Dungan, who shared codesy, an open-source startup addressing the problem of compensation for fixing bugs in open-source software. They provide a browser extension that allows users to bid on bugs as well as name their price for fixing a bug. Users may then provide proof that they fixed a bug, and once it is approved by the bidders, they receive a payout.


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!