Extravaganza – May 2016

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.

Normandy, the Recipe Server

First up was Osmose (that’s me!), sharing the news that Normandy has shipped! Normandy is a service that will eventually power several Firefox features that involve interacting with users and testing changes to Firefox quickly and safely, such as recommending features that may be useful to users or offering opportunities to try out changes. Right now the service is powering Heartbeat surveys being sent to release users.

Big thanks to the User Advocacy and Web Engineering teams for working on the project!

MDN Save Draft Feature

Next was shobson who talked about MDN‘s Safe Draft feature. When editing an MDN article, the site autosaves your edits to localStorage (if it’s available). Then, when you revisit the editing interface later, the site offers to let you restore or discard the draft, disabling autosave until a decision is made. Future improvements may include previewing drafts and notifying users when an article has changed since their draft was saved.

Air Mozilla Thumbnails

peterbe stopped by to talk about Air Mozilla‘s chapters feature, which allows users to mark and link to segments in a video. The site now auto-generates thumbnails for chapters to help preview what the chapter is about.

Roundtable

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

Docker Development Environments

Last up was jgmize, who asked about use of Docker for easy development environments. The general consensus was that most of the developers present had tried using Dockerized development environments, but tended towards using it only for deployed services or not at all.

Some of the interesting projects brought up for using Docker for development or deployment were:

Check ’em 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!