Mozilla Web Development

Welcome back! No, we didn’t forget about our blog profiles, but your humble chronicler was away and neglected to get a substitute.

So we return from our brief hiatus with the powerhouse engineer, Kumar McMillan. In his own words…

What do you do at Mozilla?

I work on addons.mozilla.org, a large Django app that hosts Firefox add-ons. We just launched marketplace.mozilla.org for apps which is an exciting new take on what an app store can be; it runs on the same codebase as the add-ons site. Open web apps can run on any device that supports modern web standards and WebRT, our web runtime. If you buy an app through Mozilla’s marketplace you can use it in any environment that we support (currently: Mac OS X, Windows, Android). If we don’t yet support it, you can roll your own by hooking into our receipt verification service. Open web apps offer a compelling promise: write your “native feeling” app once using web standards and deploy everywhere. Ours is the first app store that doesn’t lock you into a device and a vertical development silo. It’s currently not that straight forward to use HTML5, CSS3, and JS to make an app feel “native” but the incentives are pretty huge for the community to improve on this so I think we’ll see it happen (e.g. Twitter’s bootstrap, Application Cache, etc). There are some other interesting parts of the marketplace that I’m working on specifically like in-app payments.

Any fun side projects you’re working on?

I spend a lot of my free time working on a volunteer-run Internet radio station in Chicago called CHIRP Radio. I head up their Tech Dept. and help build apps for listening to CHIRP and tools for DJs to use while operating the station. CHIRP Radio is non profit and, it’s funny, there are a lot of similarities with Mozilla albeit on a much smaller scale. We develop everything in the open and engage with the open source community, for example.

I also host a radio show Tuesday mornings as DJ Bylamplight and that’s something else I spend a lot of time on: music. I like to balance my cerebral world of hacking on code with music. It’s emotional. I love to DJ songs for people because it affects their mood. I also dabble in a recording studio that I share with several engineers and bands. I just finished producing an album for Summer Girlfriends which was a lot of fun. Oh yeah, and I help run a vinyl label called Addenda and a cassette label called Plustapes. People love cassette tapes. It is true.

How did you get started in web development or programming?

I went to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago because they had a Sound Department which I thought was a neat idea. As part of my degree I did a lot of different things though: Film, Performance, Art & Technology. In the latter, I took a class where the instructor bravely had us write C code to process images (even though no one had any programming experience). We literally just made X and Y loops of pixels and wrote programs to distort images. It was super fun and from that moment I was hooked. However, art school made me realize I didn’t want to be in the art scene. The Web was exploding at the time and it felt like the place to be so I taught myself web programming (initially in PHP). The creative process of writing code isn’t very different than that of building sculptures or painting. There’s just more typing involved.

How did you get involved with Mozilla?

I’ve used the same online bookmark system since 2002 (don’t ask) and long before I joined Mozilla I had a folder of bookmarks called Mozilla. I looked up the first thing I ever bookmarked in that folder and it was this link back in 2005: http://www.mozilla.org/quality/smoketests (gone now), which was about the extensive automated test suite for Firefox. I was totally fascinated by this test suite and how they had heat map regression tests for when CSS implementations broke visual layouts. I was very inspired by this when I started to do automated testing. Mozilla felt like a pioneer in this area and many other areas.

Several years after that, Mozilla started doing a lot of work in Python and several people I knew from the open source community started working there. I liked what they were doing with Python and since they were already using some open source libraries I was working on, it was a natural fit. Actually, most of the people we hire in webdev are authors of libraries I’ve used or are authors of blog posts that turn up regularly when I search for tech help.

What’s a funny fail story or mistake you can share?

I once deployed a bad change to addon.mozilla.org‘s web service used by Firefox clients that triggered an unexpected traceback on every request. Since these service URLs serve about 8,000 requests a second it killed the cache and basically started to melt down the server cluster (the graphs were ominous). Luckily my new code was behind a feature flag so we could turn it off immediately without having to re-deploy. There ya go kids, always use feature flags. It was indeed a reminder that our flag based strategy was a good one.

What’s something you’re particularly proud of?

It still needs some work but I wrote JS TestNet to allow addons.mozilla.org to run small integration tests for our JavaScript functionality. support.mozilla.org is using it now as well. Providing a continuous integration framework for JS testing only solves half of the problem though. There is a huge gap in the JS web dev community where barely anyone writes automated tests. All the popular patterns around jQuery and jQuery plugins do not encourage you to write testable code and it’s hard to retro fit tests into code like that.

What’s coming up that you’re excited about?

I’m excited about the Mozilla apps project and how our payment systems might instigate new online business models. I’m excited about apps in general. I can’t wait to build apps for cars. I love my iPad, my Android tablet, and my Android phone. If we stand by and do nothing, the web is going to become a second class citizen in these apps-centric devices. Mozilla can change that. I think we might even get some major players like Facebook or Google to join in our crusade to appify the the web in an open and egalitarian way if we prove that our concepts will work.

I’m also excited about Sagrada and Petri, two projects that aim to build a scalable platform for hosting web applications. One day Mozilla may be able host community apps on these platforms and further our mission to keep the web open and accessible to all.

What question do you wish you’d been asked?

How do today’s open source communities relate to ancient hunter / gatherer tribes where shared resources and equality were key components?

What do you listen to while you work/program?

I listen to CHIRP Radio, WBEZ, KCRW, WFMU, This Is My Jam, Soundcloud, my record collection, and my mp3 collection. Thanks for asking.

Welcome to another thrilling installment of your favorite, and only, recurring series on this blog: Better Know a WebDev!

This is a special week, as we’re featuring someone who just moved from web development into a product role with our Add-ons team. Give a big welcome and congratulations to Greg Koberger!

What do you do at Mozilla?

For the past year and a half, I’ve been a web developer working on the Mozilla Add-ons site. I wrote both front- and back-end code, and every once in a while I managed to sneak in a little bit of design work. I recently traded in vim for Google Docs, however, and made the switch to a more product-centric role. I still get to work with the same people on the same projects, however I’ll be writing specs and designing flows rather than writing code.

Any fun side projects you’re working on?

One of most recent (and relevant) mini side projects is a Firefox Quine. It’s not a true quine, since it loads some external assets (like jQuery). However, the concept is the same: if you were to copy and paste the code that makes up the logo, it would output itself. We’re currently getting the design printed on t-shirts.

How did you get started in web development or programming?

I was lucky—my parents always made sure I had a good computer. I started by tinkering with HyperCard, and eventually decided to try making websites. I still remember how asking my parents for my first hosting account went: “Why do you need other people to see it? Can’t you just play with it yourself on your computer?” Luckily they finally agreed, and I started teaching myself PHP and JavaScript.

How did you get involved with Mozilla?

While in college, there was an alumni talk about working at Mozilla. I missed the talk, however I emailed the guy after since I was curious. He encouraged me to apply, and I flew out to California to interview. I fell in love with the company. The people I interviewed with were awesome, and I was amazed by the company culture. Everyone just wanted to make the web a better place.

What’s a funny fail story or mistake you can share?

Back when I first started at Mozilla, I managed to delete all my private keys. So, some of the other webdevs set up a tissue-box-based “Computer School Fund” for me. I made $20 for deleting my private keys, so I like to think I got the last laugh.

What’s something you’re particularly proud of?

Back in November, awareness of SOPA was just starting to pick up. The day before the initial hearing, a bunch of us decided to try to raise awareness. It was incredibly last minute, but we knew we had to do something. We could get the message out via the snippet on about:home, which serves about 300MM requests a day. However, we had nowhere to link to. SOPA was new, and there wasn’t a definitive source with a few easy-to-digest bullet points. Plus, we couldn’t really send millions of hits to a website without giving them fair notice. So, we made our own. I sketched it out on paper and wrote out the copy. Then, as I designed it in Photoshop, my fellow webdev Potch sat next to me and wrote the code. We didn’t even have time to share files; he just watched what I was doing and wrote the code. It took us about an hour—which is all we had, since it still had to be deployed and tested. We couldn’t have gotten it out without help from all the different teams at Mozilla—everyone from legal to QA to IT to webdev worked late to make it happen. It was a huge success. We got the word about SOPA out to millions of Firefox users within 24 hours. We were able to use the same site a few months later for the SOPA blackout.

What’s coming up that you’re excited about?

I’m really excited about my new product management role. I love new challenges. It’s a great time to start this job, since a lot is going on with AMO right now. “Marketplace” (apps and add-ons combined, with the ability to charge) is going to be a huge project in the upcoming months. I can’t wait to see what our team can make in the upcoming months.

What software do you use day-to-day for the work you do?

My main machine is a 13″ Macbook Air running OS X Lion. I use vim for writing code, which all ends up on GitHub. I rely heavily on Firefox and Firebug for testing and debugging. I spend a good amount of time in Photoshop, mocking things up before I start coding. I couldn’t survive without either Rdio or Pandora playing in the background.

Welcome back to the third epic installment of Better Know a WebDev!

We started with our illustrious director, Mike Morgan, and then someone volunteered that the chronicler, yours truly, should be up next. But now we’re just going to randomly hop around through our entire web dev family. And there’s a lot of us!

Up this week, put your internet hands together for Will Kahn-Greene!

What do you do at Mozilla?

I’m a software engineer in the webdev group that works on the software that runs support.mozilla.org. That entails working directly on kitsune—the software that runs support.mozilla.org—and its dependencies. I also spend some time working on making development life easier.

Any fun side projects you’re working on?

I have too many side projects, so I sort of bounce between them month-to-month. I’m the current maintainer of Pyblosxom—a file-based weblog system. I’m a cofounder of MediaGoblin and help maintain project infrastructure. I run Python Miro Community. I also work on Miro and Miro Community, though in a diminished capacity since I left PCF to work at Mozilla.

How did you get started in web development?

Long story short, I started writing web pages and CGI programs in C, then Perl, in undergrad. I learned enough to become an “authority” and taught a class on web-design and authoring in Microsoft Online Institute. The version of MOLI that I used was a web-based chat system. I thought it was pretty lacking, so I did my senior undergrad thesis studying web-based instruction and building a better system. From there, I did a bunch of consulting on large web-sites using IIS/ASP then Java EJBs/JSP/Servlets. After consulting, I switched sides (producer → consumer of web apps) and worked for a company writing a scraper for financial data.

How did you get involved with Mozilla?

In undergrad, we had Mosaic installed on the computers in the lab and I used that until I switched to Netscape. I used that for a few versions, then got really excited when Mozilla formed and started doing M releases. I’ve been using a Mozilla browser ever since.

I worked for Participatory Culture Foundation on the Miro media player, but while there worked on a variety of side projects including Firefox extensions, scripts that augmented the PCF Bugzilla instance, Universal Subtitles, and also I wrote the code that showed enclosure information in the feed preview page for Firefox 3 (or 3.5—I forget when it landed).

When a Mozilla recruiter asked if I’d be interested in working for Mozilla as an employee, I jumped at the chance.

What’s a funny fail story or mistake you can share?

Seems like everyone’s done the “rm -rf /” thing. Me, too. Though it was less funny and more of that “oh, what have I done!” sinking feeling of despair.

The fail story I often tell people who seem apprehensive about computers and doing things with them happened when I was in undergrad. I had been programming since like 4th grade in a bunch of environments and knew my way around PC computers, Windows… but I hadn’t had much experience with Macs. In college, we had a Mac lab. So I trot into the Mac lab to work on my first homework assignment for CS 1 and I sit down and I look at the Mac and it had no visible on/off switch. I looked on the sides and the back. Nothing—no switches or anything on/off-related. I looked for instructions nearby. Nothing. I was so embarrassed that I couldn’t figure out how to turn the computer on that I left and got a 0 on that homework. Turns out that the “on” key was on the keyboard in the upper right hand corner and had a triangle on it. For this particular Mac, there was no “off” switch. I never would have guessed that. The moral of the story being that computers are mysterious and a total pain in the ass even for people who have lots of experience with them.

What’s coming up that you’re excited about?

I started at Mozilla in September 2011, so I’ve only been here a short while and it’s hard not to be excited about everything. Seems like every day I hang out with the Mozilla folks, I learn something new and about the existence of ten things I wasn’t previously aware of.

A less hand-wavey answer might go along these lines: I’m excited about the momentum towards open web apps and reducing the barriers to web development. Literacy with web development is a powerful thing. Being able to run apps everywhere is also a powerful thing.

Welcome back to our Better Know a WebDev series! This week, we’re looking at, well, me!

What do you do at Mozilla?

I’m the Community Platforms Manager. I’m here to help the people on the Support, MDN, and Community Tools engineering teams turn out great products and grow as engineers. Since I get to work with a number of different projects, I have the opportunity to look for ways these applications can work together and create a better experience for our users and better data for our engineers.

Any fun side projects you’re working on?

Lately I’ve been working with Django and MongoDB for fun, and trying to help out in that part of the Django ecosystem where I can. I also maintain a few libraries, like Bleach, and write useful—or useless—IRC bots from time to time.

As a proud resident of New York City, I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to push Mozilla further into the New York tech scene, mostly by giving talks on things like continuous deployment, building really large scale web apps, and even why Open Source Software is so great.

How did you get started in web development?

A friend of mine showed me his Geocities page, back when you still had neighbors on Geocities. I jumped in, found a tutorial and went from there. In college, I got a job doing some app development and maintenance that exposed me to a bunch of languages and working with a team, where I quickly learned the phrase “best practices.”

How did you get involved with Mozilla?

I started using Firefox when it was still Phoenix, and being a user was about the limit of my involvement until 2009, when I applied for a job here.

One of the things that initially surprised me was that all of our websites are Open Source, but then I realized there was no other way for web development at Mozilla to operate. In the past couple years, I think we’ve improved a lot here by being more outgoing members of the Django and Python communities, and we have some regular contributors now.

What’s a funny fail or mistake you’re willing to share?

Well, there was that one time I ran an UPDATE statement without a WHERE clause on a production database. I think we all have one like that.

At Mozilla, the most epic was probably the SUMO 2.0 release, which took a solid 12 hours, took down a cluster serving over a dozens sites, and—at around 4am, a few hours after we thought we were in the clear and had all gone to bed—fell over, requiring a roll back and for us to do it again a week later.

I learned a lot in that week. And now whenever someone in our IT group calls me, the ringtone sounds pretty urgent.

What’s one thing coming up that you’re excited about? What makes it exciting?

2012! Community Platforms is a new group, and Community Tools in particular is a new team, and I am really looking forward to seeing what we accomplish in 2012. Growing the Support and MDN teams and building the Tools team are going to be fun challenges. One of my goals is to start turning our siloed applications into platforms to empower our users and developers, and I can’t wait to see what new, innovative ideas our community builds on them.