Extravaganza – July 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.

Basket switch to Salesforce

First up was pmac, who shared the news that Basket, email newsletter subscription service, has switched to using Salesforce as the backend for storing newsletter subscriptions. In addition, the service now has a nifty public DataDog metrics dashboard showing off statistics about how the service is performing.

Engagement Engineering Status Board

Next was giorgos, who shared status.mozmar.org, a status page listing the current status of all the services that Engagement Engineering maintains. The status board pulls monitoring information from Dead Man’s Snitch as well as New Relic‘s application and Synthetics monitoring. The app runs a worker using AWS Lambda that pulls the information and writes it to a YAML file in the repo‘s gh-pages branch, and the status page itself reads the YAML file via JavaScript to build the display.

DXR

ErikRose stopped by to share more cool things that shipped in DXR this month:

  • Indexing for XBL and JavaScript.
  • Indexing 32+ new projects
  • Added a 3rd build server
  • Several performance optimizations that cut down build times by roughly 25%.
  • C++ macro definitions, method overrides, pure virtuals, substructs, and more are all now indexed. In addition, you can now easily jump between header files and their implementations.
  • UI improvements, including contrast improvements, a new filename filter, and jumping directly to files that are the only result of a query.

Special thanks to intern new_one and contributors twointofive and abbeyj. Also special thanks to MXR for being shut down due to security bugs and allowing DXR to flourish in its wake.

Fathom 1.0 and 1.1

Erik also brought up Fathom, an experimental framework for extracting meaning from webpages. Fathom allows you to write declarative rules that score and classify DOM nodes, and then extract those nodes from a DOM that it analyzes.

This month we shipped the 1.0 version of Fathom, as well as a 1.1 release with a bug fix for Firefox support as well as an optimization fix. It’s available as an NPM module for use as a library.

Roundtable

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

Engagement Engineering Hiring – Senior Webdev and Site Reliability Engineer

Last up was pmac again, who wanted to mention that the Mozilla Engagement Engineering team is hiring a Senior Web Developer and a Site Reliability Engineer. If you’re interested in working at Mozilla, click those links to apply on our careers site!


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!