Mozilla (old posts, page 4)

Soloists: code review on a solo project

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Summary

I work on some projects with other people, but I also spend a lot of time working on projects by myself. When I'm working by myself, I have difficulties with the following:

  1. code review
  2. bouncing ideas off of people
  3. peer programming
  4. long slogs
  5. getting help when I'm stuck
  6. publicizing my work
  7. dealing with loneliness
  8. going on vacation

I started a #soloists group at Mozilla figuring there are a bunch of other Mozillians who are working on solo projects and maybe if we all work alone together, then that might alleviate some of the problems of working solo. We hang out in the #soloists IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org. If you're solo, join us!

I keep thinking about writing a set of blog posts for things we've talked about in the channel and how I do things. Maybe they'll help you.

This one covers code review.

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Antenna: post-mortem and project wrap-up

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Summary

Socorro is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products like Firefox. When Firefox crashes, the Breakpad crash reporter asks the user if the user would like to send a crash report. If the user answers "yes!", then the Breakpad crash reporter collects data related to the crash, generates a crash report, and submits that crash report as an HTTP POST to Socorro--specifically the Socorro collector.

The Socorro collector is one of several components that comprise Socorro. Each of the components has different uptime requirements and different security risk profiles. However, all the code is maintained in a single repository and we deploy everything every time we do a deploy. This is increasingly inflexible and makes it difficult for us to make architectural changes to Socorro without affecting everything and incurring uptime risk for components that have high uptime requirements.

Because of that, in early 2016, we embarked on a rearchitecture to split out some components of Socorro into separate services. The first component to get split out was the Socorro collector since it needs has the highest uptime requirements of all the Socorro components, but rarely changes, so it'd be a lot easier to meet those requirements if it was separate from the rest of Socorro.

Thus I was tasked with splitting out the Socorro collector and this blog post covers that project. It's a bit stream-of-consciousness, because I think there's some merit to explaining the thought process behind how I did the work over the course of the project for other people working on projects.

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The Soloists

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Building Firefox is a big endeavor. There are many teams and projects covering initiatives, maintenance, bug fixing, triage, localization, support, understanding feedback, marketing, communication, releasing, supporting infrastructure, crash analysis, and a bazillion other activities all to build a family of browsers and applications.

Teams and projects aren't static. People move around as priorities change and the landscape shifts and projects complete or are scuttled.

Sometimes projects get started up with a single person. Sometimes all the people except one move off a project. Sometimes we find ourselves working alone, in a basement office, with only a stapler equivalent to keep us company.

We are the soloists. You wouldn't believe the list of things we work on. Alone.

Where to find soloists: IRC, Slack

There's an IRC channel #soloists on irc.mozilla.org.

There's also a Slack channel #soloists on the Mozilla Slack [1].

These two places (and whatever other places soloists want to hang out at) are places where we can:

  • find some solace from the weary drudgery of being alone on their projects for days on end
  • ask for help
  • bounce ideas off each other
  • vent frustrations in a friendly forgiving place
  • get advice on dealing with things like code reviews and how to go on vacation
  • get recognition for a job well done

and a variety of other things that alleviate many of the problems we have as soloists.

[1] I just created it, so it's kind of empty. I'm feeling alone in the #soloists Slack channel. So alone.

Stickers at the All Hands!

Over the last month or so, we spent some time figuring out #soloists stickers because we like stickers and you like stickers and everyone likes stickers.

They look like this:

/images/soloist_2017_handdrawn.thumbnail.png

Soloist 2017 sticker.

They're 2" by 2" and round. They're warm to the touch. They make you want to climb things. By yourself. Alone. With appropriate safety gear. [2]

If you're a soloist, come find one of us and get a sticker. Also, consider joining soloist channels.

If you support soloists, come find one of us and get a sticker. Ask us about the things we're working on. We may be solo, but we're working on real projects that almost certainly affect you. As a group, we did great things in the last 6 months. Alone. So alone.

[2] That's how they make me feel, anyhow.

Standup v2: the rewrite

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What is Standup?

Standup is a system for capturing standup-style posts from individuals making it easier to see what's going on for teams and projects. It has an associated IRC bot standups for posting messages from IRC.

This post talks a bit about the Standup v2 rewrite. Why and how we did it and what's next.

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Standup v2: system test

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What is Standup?

Standup is a system for capturing standup-style posts from individuals making it easier to see what's going on for teams and projects. It has an associated IRC bot standups for posting messages from IRC.

Join us for a Standup v2 system test!

Paul and I did a ground-up rewrite of the Standup web-app to transition from Persona to GitHub auth, release us from the shackles of the old architecture and usher in a new era for Standup and its users.

We're done with the most minimal of minimal viable products. It's missing some features that the current Standup has mostly around team management, but otherwise it's the same-ish down to the lavish shade of purple in the header that Rehan graced the site with so long ago.

If you're a Standup user, we need your help testing Standup v2 on the -stage environment before Thursday, September 22nd, 2016!

We've thrown together a GitHub issue to (ab)use as a forum for test results and working out what needs to get fixed before we push Standup v2 to production. It's got instructions that should cover everything you need to know.

Why you would want to help:

  1. You get to see Standup v2 before it rolls out and point out anything that's missing that affects you.

  2. You get a chance to discover parts of Standup you may not have known about previously.

  3. This is a chance for you to lend a hand on this community project that helps you which we're all working on in our free time.

  4. Once we get Standup v2 up, there are a bunch of things we can do with Standup that will make it more useful. Freddy is itching to fix IRC-related issues and wants https support [1]. I want to implement user API tokens, a cli and search. Paul want's to have better weekly team reports and project pages.

    There are others listed in the issue tracker and some that we never wrote down.

    We need to get over the Standup v2 hurdle first.

Why you wouldn't want to help:

  1. You're on PTO.

    Stop reading--enjoy that PTO!

  2. It's the end of the quarter and you're swamped.

    Sounds like you're short on time. Spare a minute and do something in the Short on time, but want to help anyhow? section.

  3. You're looking to stop using Standup.

    I'd love to know what you're planning to switch to. If we can meet peoples' needs with some other service, that's more free time for me and Paul.

  4. Some fourth thing I lack the imagination to think of.

    If you have some other blocker to helping, toss me an email.

Hooray for the impending Standup v2!

[1] This is in progress--we're just waiting for a cert.

Input: Trigger rule project Phase 1

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Summary

Last quarter, I finished up the suggester framework for Input. When a user leaves feedback, registered suggester modules would look at the feedback metadata and text and return suggested links. The suggested links would then show up on the Thank You page. Users could then read a bit about the link and click on it if it was appealing.

The first suggester I wrote does a search against SUMO kb articles to see if any of the kb articles seemed relevant to the feedback. Users frequently leave feedback about problems they're having that could be known issues with known solutions or even problems Firefox solves with features the user wasn't aware of. Because of this, it behooves us greatly to guide these users to the solutions that make their Firefox experience better. I wrote a post about that.

This project covers adding a new suggester that allows analyzers to set up trigger rules for suggestions which is stored in the database. When feedback matches the criteria for a trigger rule, then the suggestion is shown.

I pushed out the last code changes on September 9th, 2015. On September 25th, we created a trigger rule for feedback talking about Norton's addon and suggested a link for a SUMO kb article that talks about the problem. In the 5 days, 22 people saw the suggestion and 6 clicked on the link.

This blog post is a write-up for the Trigger rule project phase 1.

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Input: Moving to Django 1.8

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Over the course of 2015, we've been reworking large parts of the Fjord codebase to do the following:

  1. ditch jingo and friends and other libraries that deviate from typical Django and aren't active projects
  2. reduce complexity by moving closer to a "default/typical Django project"
  3. upgrade to Django 1.8

This blog post covers many grueling details including order we did things, design decisions we made and some anecdotes.

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Input: 2015q2 quarter in review

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2015q2 was a bit slower bug-count-wise than 2015q1, but we got some important things accomplished.

Things to know:

  • Input is Mozilla's product feedback site.
  • Fjord is the code that runs Input.
  • We maintain project details and plans at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Input.
  • I am Will Kahn-Greene and I'm the tech lead, architect, QA and primary developer on Input.

This is the quarter in review for Mozilla Input!

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