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Mozilla Webdev

Better Know a WebDev: Lars Lohn

Posted: May 11th, 2012, 2:08pm CDT by groovecoder

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]
This week’s special guest on Better Know a WebDev, K Lars Lohn!

What do you do at Mozilla?
Officially, I am the the Software Architect for the Socorro project. Unofficially, I spread chaos and confusion as a self proclaimed Cowboy Programmer. I proudly stand as the only member of Webdev that does no Web development. My work is all behind the scenes at the server and daemon level.

Socorro was handed to me in May of 2008 as a non-working system that needed to be functional for the June Firefox 3 launch. Even with short schedule, I met the deadline, but the result was a pure unadulterated hack. With ambiguous to nonexistent specs, I continued development as a solo performance art piece. Some features still in use today went from concept to production in less than thirty minutes. Eventually, a team formed around me and we began the slow process of applying standards and retroactive forethought to the codebase. Today the system serves terabytes of data and handles millions of transactions per day.
Any fun side projects you’re working on?
All of my side projects are fun, but they’re not all software related:
- I run a wholesale nursery specializing in roses. I’ve literally thousands of varieties in a rose garden that spans an entire acre. I’m a plant nerd with seven greenhouses and an appetite for strange plants.
- I’m constantly tinkering with my 2008 Harley FX-STB. I added a USB port to it. I’m writing software to monitor engine performance and tweak the fuel injectors. Maybe I can find a way to make a B2G app for it.
- I play Baroque oboe and recorder for my own amusement. I’ve also just placed a foot in the world of electronic instruments with a Yamaha WX5 MIDI woodwind instrument that drives a synth. I’m suddenly writing MIDI interface code in Python.
How did you get started in web development or programming?
I’ve been captivated by computers and programming since 1974 when my high school math lab got its first timeshare account on the local university mainframe. I wrote games. By 1992, I had educated myself out of the local job market moving to the proverbial Silicon Forest of Oregon.

My first actual Web development project was in 1999 when I opened the nursery. Written in C++ with Rogue Wave and Microsoft tools, it was brittle, but fast. I rewrote the system in 2002 using an open source stack: Python, Apache and Postgres. In the era of Netscape and IE6, I learned very quickly that I am not a user interface designer: getting a consistent and aesthetic user experience is hard. My career doing user facing web design mercifully ended when I sold the retail part of the nursery business in 2007.
How did you get involved with Mozilla?
In the mid aughts, I worked for Oregon State University at the Open Source Lab. My fearless leader volunteered me to work on Mozilla projects. At the time, Mozilla was primarily hosted at the OSL. On leaving the University in 2006, I ran into Shrep, then CTO of Mozilla, at OSCON and he offered me contract work. I converted to full time employment in 2008.
What’s a funny fail or mistake story you can share?
I was asked to review the work being done in Ramora, a version of AMO. I thought what they were doing with MySQL was absurd and I expressed the sentiment giving some suggestions as to an alternative direction that could work better. I also recall pointing out the flaws in my own method: too many joins for MySOL to handle. I expected to start a lively discussion, but the debate never came and I forgot about it. I was horrified to discover a month later that my word had been taken as gospel. It was implemented and sent to production, warts and all. I shudder to think of how long it took the AMO team to undo that ill advice.
What’s something you’re particularly proud of?
I was instrumental in the creation of DBTools.h++, an object oriented database abstraction class library in C++ for Rogue Wave Software in the early nineties. Think of it as a C++ version of SQLAlchemy, created ten years before that software came into existence. The class library became very popular with phone companies, airlines and investment banks. This evolved into a lucrative career for me later in the decade doing lectures and code reviews for Rogue Wave customers. Imagine me in my Harley t-shirt and jeans walking into a Wall Street investment bank ready to critique code written by the suits…
What’s coming up that you’re excited about?
In Socorro-land, I’m excited about the adoption of Configman. The project started as a unification library for configuration and became a dependency injection framework. With the ability to load classes at run time, Socorro will be able drop in storage schemes, alternative processing algorithms, or swap out any number of other subsystems. Configman is the key that gives Socorro the ability to scale from a tiny installation receiving a handful of crashes per day, to huge systems like ours that processes millions.
What question do you wish you’d been asked?
There is great wisdom in the aphorism, “everything old is new again”. Just like most aspects of human endeavor, programming is subject to the whims of fashion. Perfectly legitimate languages and engineering practices fall from favor because something new and shiny comes around. The old technologies are a gold mine of ideas and techniques that can solve today’s problems. Take time to explore Lisp, Smalltalk, APL or even Fortran. Don’t let dogma limit freedom of expression. Monoculture is a bad idea in software engineering just like it is in agriculture.
What kind of app do you want to see on Boot2Gecko?
Good Lord, I can’t just think of just one. I want a full spectrum of apps on B2G. GTD (Getting Things Done) software plays an important part in my daily life. Omnifocus is what keeps me tethered to iOS. Liberate me!
Better Know a WebDev: Laura Thomson

Posted: April 6th, 2012, 1:20pm CDT by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

As we wind our way through the warbling webdevs, this week we come to Laura Thomson, who literally wrote the book on PHP and MySQL web development. Laura has worked on many projects within Mozilla, and now, she’s… well, I’ll let her tell you.

What do you do at Mozilla?
I’m the Webtools Engineering Manager. Webtools looks after the webapps that are used by Mozillians, with a focus on tools that are used to ship Firefox. This means our projects range from things as big as Socorro (crash-stats.mozilla.com, crash analysis data) through to writing a Bugzilla plugin for wiki.mozilla.org. We work with a lot of different technologies: PHP/Python/Node/Perl/MySQL/PostgreSQL/HBase/Redis/etc) and with a lot of different teams inside Mozilla: IT, Engineering, RelEng, and QA to name a few.
Any fun side projects you’re working on?
Right now I’m working on the 5th edition of PHP and MySQL Web Development. Revising books is always a cross between great fun and pulling my hair out.
How did you get started in web development or programming?
I started programming in the fourth grade. A nearby school had an Apple II, and they were bussing kids in the district who were good at math in once a week to learn to code in LOGO. Everybody else there was in the eighth grade. (I was a total math nerd so I got to go along.)

Web development started when I was in college and Mosaic came out. As soon as I saw it, I knew this was what I wanted to do. I wrote my first CGI scripts later in college, in C, and then moved on through Perl to PHP. (These days it’s PHP and Python, for the most part.)
How did you get involved with Mozilla?
I was introduced to former VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer (now at Facebook) by a mutual friend and hired as the third webdev in 2007, after Wil Clouser and Mike Morgan. I hadn’t been involved with the project before that, although I had long been a Firefox user.

I remember when I interviewed most of the interviews were with non-webdevs for obvious reasons, and Dan Mosedale said “Do you know C++? I’d rather ask you about that than webdev,” and then gave me a series of questions about Duff’s Device and other such fun things.
What’s a funny fail or mistake story you can share?
I have a few of these, but this is my favorite. In 2010 we released a version of Socorro (1.8) that we ended up rolling back, after 72 solid hours of trying to fail forward, due to a number of performance problems. After 24 hours, people started bringing us food – donuts, bagels, casseroles – and then I realized our release had died and we were at a wake.

The version number was retired, like a flight that crashed, and will never be re-used. I learned a huge amount from that disaster, and it began the project’s epic journey toward test automation, continuous integration, configuration management, and overall sleeping well at night.
What’s something you’re particularly proud of?
I am Australian, so I squirm at this question. (We specialize in self-deprecation.) Having said that, there are three things, in no particular order: 1. Making Socorro happy. 2. Having written the all time best-selling open source programming book. 3. My two year old daughter, Kate.

What’s coming up that you’re excited about?
B2G. I think it’s amazing. I hope it smashes holes in the silos that are growing up around apps and user data, giving control back to the users. It’s also super exciting on a technical level.
What question do you wish you’d been asked?
“Five years is a long time to stay at one company – what keeps you at Mozilla?”

The same things that brought me here in the first place. Really good and genuinely nice people, hard projects, and most of all the mission: to serve and protect the Open Web.
Deep dish or thin crust?
I don’t often eat pizza, but when I do it’s thin crust.
Better Know a WebDev: Laura Thomson

Posted: April 6th, 2012, 1:20pm CDT by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

As we wind our way through the warbling webdevs, this week we come to Laura Thomson, who literally wrote the book on PHP and MySQL web development. Laura has worked on many projects within Mozilla, and now, she’s… well, I’ll let her tell you.

What do you do at Mozilla?
I’m the Webtools Engineering Manager. Webtools looks after the webapps that are used by Mozillians, with a focus on tools that are used to ship Firefox. This means our projects range from things as big as Socorro (crash-stats.mozilla.com, crash analysis data) through to writing a Bugzilla plugin for wiki.mozilla.org. We work with a lot of different technologies: PHP/Python/Node/Perl/MySQL/PostgreSQL/HBase/Redis/etc) and with a lot of different teams inside Mozilla: IT, Engineering, RelEng, and QA to name a few.
Any fun side projects you’re working on?
Right now I’m working on the 5th edition of PHP and MySQL Web Development. Revising books is always a cross between great fun and pulling my hair out.
How did you get started in web development or programming?
I started programming in the fourth grade. A nearby school had an Apple II, and they were bussing kids in the district who were good at math in once a week to learn to code in LOGO. Everybody else there was in the eighth grade. (I was a total math nerd so I got to go along.)

Web development started when I was in college and Mosaic came out. As soon as I saw it, I knew this was what I wanted to do. I wrote my first CGI scripts later in college, in C, and then moved on through Perl to PHP. (These days it’s PHP and Python, for the most part.)
How did you get involved with Mozilla?
I was introduced to former VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer (now at Facebook) by a mutual friend and hired as the third webdev in 2007, after Wil Clouser and Mike Morgan. I hadn’t been involved with the project before that, although I had long been a Firefox user.

I remember when I interviewed most of the interviews were with non-webdevs for obvious reasons, and Dan Mosedale said “Do you know C++? I’d rather ask you about that than webdev,” and then gave me a series of questions about Duff’s Device and other such fun things.
What’s a funny fail or mistake story you can share?
I have a few of these, but this is my favorite. In 2010 we released a version of Socorro (1.8) that we ended up rolling back, after 72 solid hours of trying to fail forward, due to a number of performance problems. After 24 hours, people started bringing us food – donuts, bagels, casseroles – and then I realized our release had died and we were at a wake.

The version number was retired, like a flight that crashed, and will never be re-used. I learned a huge amount from that disaster, and it began the project’s epic journey toward test automation, continuous integration, configuration management, and overall sleeping well at night.
What’s something you’re particularly proud of?
I am Australian, so I squirm at this question. (We specialize in self-deprecation.) Having said that, there are three things, in no particular order: 1. Making Socorro happy. 2. Having written the all time best-selling open source programming book. 3. My two year old daughter, Kate.

What’s coming up that you’re excited about?
B2G. I think it’s amazing. I hope it smashes holes in the silos that are growing up around apps and user data, giving control back to the users. It’s also super exciting on a technical level.
What question do you wish you’d been asked?
“Five years is a long time to stay at one company – what keeps you at Mozilla?”

The same things that brought me here in the first place. Really good and genuinely nice people, hard projects, and most of all the mission: to serve and protect the Open Web.
Deep dish or thin crust?
I don’t often eat pizza, but when I do it’s thin crust.
Better Know a WebDev: Brandon Savage

Posted: March 30th, 2012, 1:30pm CDT by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

Welcome back my friends to the blog post series that’s never on time.

This week we’re peering into the life of one of our Webtools engineers, pilot and politics-junkie, Brandon Savage!

What do you do at Mozilla?
I work, and have worked, on a number of projects. I started working on Personas and AMO part time, and now work on Socorro full time. I also am responsible for several new projects, like the Mediawiki-Bugzilla extension, and Dragnet, which will be a public list of Windows DLL files, and whether or not they are valid or malware. These projects are important for the release of Firefox and other products, and I love being able to be part of that process.
Any fun side projects you’re working on?
I’m working on a second book, an E-book. The details are still being fleshed out, but I’m thinking it will be on the topic of refactoring legacy code without going crazy. I also blog regularly. I spend most of my day coding and I spend much of my free time engaging in other hobbies, like aviation, and I’m presently working to restore a 1967 Piper Cherokee 235, which I bought in January.
How did you get started in web development or programming?
I realized that I could automate things, and that this made my life easier. Initially I wanted to run an online role playing game. After I spent months building it, I found I loved writing code and that I could use it to make money. Merging one’s passion with one’s employment is a sure way to love what you do!
How did you get involved with Mozilla?
I’ve been using Firefox as long as I can remember. Firebug was invaluable to me for years as a web developer, especially when I worked for more design-oriented shops and was responsible for turning designs into PHP-driven applications (I was able to inspect elements and get the right CSS information to display). But my employment with Mozilla started more recently than that. I knew Laura Thomson through her husband as well as the PHP community, and I sent her a copy of my resume, hoping to work specifically with her. That strategy seems to have paid off.
What’s a funny fail or mistake story you can share?
When we released the Harry Potter Personas for Firefox, that project was done in secret. Due to the fact that we received all the information only a few days beforehand, the names and descriptions of the Personas were too long for the web form and database. This resulted in some hilarity while we took lots of time to fix what should have been a minor thing to fix, because we were running into the bugs one at a time. Eventually we got it launched, and I can laugh about it now, but that was pretty stressful.
What’s something you’re particularly proud of?
I went from having written nothing in Django to having written a full application in Django within six months. That’s pretty awesome for someone who doesn’t have a programming background (I studied political science and taught myself to program). I’m also really proud to work for Mozilla, because I know every day I am helping to make the web a better place.
What’s coming up that you’re excited about?
Native PDF support in Firefox was recently committed to Nightly; this is something that I’ve been wanting for a long time and I’m thrilled it’s coming! I’m also really excited about the future of the web. And I can’t wait for us to finally have our onsite! I love getting together with coworkers.
What question do you wish you’d been asked?
I’m remote, so I always like to talk about the experience of working remotely and what it’s really like. People often think working from home is their dream job; they imagine themselves drinking coffee in their bathrobes and being relaxed. Working from home isn’t like that. It’s pretty awesome, but pretty isolating at times. It’s not for everybody, because you have to keep yourself motivated and there’s often travel involved. I love working remotely, and I’m glad I did it.
What’s your favorite beer style?
I’m not a big beer drinker or alcohol drinker at all. I’d have to say root beer.
Better Know a WebDev: Brandon Savage

Posted: March 30th, 2012, 1:30pm CDT by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

Welcome back my friends to the blog post series that’s never on time.

This week we’re peering into the life of one of our Webtools engineers, pilot and politics-junkie, Brandon Savage!

What do you do at Mozilla?
I work, and have worked, on a number of projects. I started working on Personas and AMO part time, and now work on Socorro full time. I also am responsible for several new projects, like the Mediawiki-Bugzilla extension, and Dragnet, which will be a public list of Windows DLL files, and whether or not they are valid or malware. These projects are important for the release of Firefox and other products, and I love being able to be part of that process.
Any fun side projects you’re working on?
I’m working on a second book, an E-book. The details are still being fleshed out, but I’m thinking it will be on the topic of refactoring legacy code without going crazy. I also blog regularly. I spend most of my day coding and I spend much of my free time engaging in other hobbies, like aviation, and I’m presently working to restore a 1967 Piper Cherokee 235, which I bought in January.
How did you get started in web development or programming?
I realized that I could automate things, and that this made my life easier. Initially I wanted to run an online role playing game. After I spent months building it, I found I loved writing code and that I could use it to make money. Merging one’s passion with one’s employment is a sure way to love what you do!
How did you get involved with Mozilla?
I’ve been using Firefox as long as I can remember. Firebug was invaluable to me for years as a web developer, especially when I worked for more design-oriented shops and was responsible for turning designs into PHP-driven applications (I was able to inspect elements and get the right CSS information to display). But my employment with Mozilla started more recently than that. I knew Laura Thomson through her husband as well as the PHP community, and I sent her a copy of my resume, hoping to work specifically with her. That strategy seems to have paid off.
What’s a funny fail or mistake story you can share?
When we released the Harry Potter Personas for Firefox, that project was done in secret. Due to the fact that we received all the information only a few days beforehand, the names and descriptions of the Personas were too long for the web form and database. This resulted in some hilarity while we took lots of time to fix what should have been a minor thing to fix, because we were running into the bugs one at a time. Eventually we got it launched, and I can laugh about it now, but that was pretty stressful.
What’s something you’re particularly proud of?
I went from having written nothing in Django to having written a full application in Django within six months. That’s pretty awesome for someone who doesn’t have a programming background (I studied political science and taught myself to program). I’m also really proud to work for Mozilla, because I know every day I am helping to make the web a better place.
What’s coming up that you’re excited about?
Native PDF support in Firefox was recently committed to Nightly; this is something that I’ve been wanting for a long time and I’m thrilled it’s coming! I’m also really excited about the future of the web. And I can’t wait for us to finally have our onsite! I love getting together with coworkers.
What question do you wish you’d been asked?
I’m remote, so I always like to talk about the experience of working remotely and what it’s really like. People often think working from home is their dream job; they imagine themselves drinking coffee in their bathrobes and being relaxed. Working from home isn’t like that. It’s pretty awesome, but pretty isolating at times. It’s not for everybody, because you have to keep yourself motivated and there’s often travel involved. I love working remotely, and I’m glad I did it.
What’s your favorite beer style?
I’m not a big beer drinker or alcohol drinker at all. I’d have to say root beer.
Better Know a WebDev: Luke Crouch (aka groovecoder)

Posted: March 9th, 2012, 10:20am CST by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

It’s Friday, Friday, gotta write a blog post on Friday!

Hitting memes at the height of their popularity is easy. Dredging up memories weeks or months later is more fun.

Now, on to today’s Better Know a WebDev! In this corner, the Terror of Tulsa, the Oracle of Oklahoma, Luuuuuke Croooouch!

What do you do at Mozilla?
I learn a ton from other Mozillians while I work on the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) site. MDN hosts awesome web documentation and we’re expanding to host demos, events, profiles, and more. We’re migrating the wiki from MindTouch to our own Django-powered Kuma code – a clone of the Kitsune code that powers Support. Along the way we’re still adding features like BrowserID and fixing as many bugs as we can. I also organize our sprints and do a little product management until we hire an official MDN product manager. BTW, we’re hiring!
Any fun side projects you’re working on?
Most of my side projects are caught up in [tulsawebdevs.org], of which I’m the Chief Sanitation Officer. Specifically, I’m scraping some local public data and preparing for [tulsahackathon.com].

I also brew my own beer as often as I can. Once a month I retreat to a Benedictine Abbey here in Oklahoma to brew beer with them.
How did you get started in web development or programming?
I picked up an HTML book around ’93, kicked around in Flash while, took the Pascal, C, and Java classes in high school and took a webmaster vocational tech class. But I really decided to stick with web development when I hacked out my first database-powered HTML page one night in college – a table with 2 rows of dynamically-generated content using SQL Server and ASP on IIS!
How did you get involved with Mozilla?
I’ve used Firefox since I switched from Netscape Navigator. But I had only ever skirted around the contribution path (a behavior I’m also trying to address with our WebDev Stewards stuff).

As for working here, that’s a little complicated and involved a lot of luck! I built ajaxMyTop while doing “enterprise” development. When I got an unsolicited patch for it, I was hooked forever on the open-source model. So when I saw an online job posting for SourceForge.net, I jumped on it, got in, and learned a ton about open-source and web development. Four years later I saw an online job posting at Mozilla and I jumped again!
What’s a funny fail story or mistake you can share?
Don’t push big code changes while you’re at a conference!

We pushed changes to the SourceForge.net File Release System and corresponding download redirector while at OSCON ’09. It caused recursive redirects which broke all SourceForge.net downloads for over an hour! (Millions of downloads) The conference WiFi broke so a dozen of us had to share a single 2G cell phone ‘net connection to fix it.
What’s something you’re particularly proud of?
I was honored to give the keynote talk at PHP Conference Brasil in 2008, where I showed how SourceForge.net used PHP. I’m proud of all the Tulsa Web Devs – doing stuff every bit as cool as the web scenes in other towns. I’m proud of my wife for putting up with all my quirks and my nearly mono-maniacal focus on web development.
What’s coming up that you’re excited about?
All of Mozilla’s new stuff – Boot to Gecko, Apps, and Persona are extremely important projects for the internet. I’m trying to patch dochub so it could serve as MDN’s Open Web App, and I think we could try some cool things like MDN Open Web Badges. I also like the idea of using a federated wiki protocol for web documentation, and hosting web developer html5 ebooks on MDN.
What question do you wish you’d been asked?
What’s with the name ‘groovecoder’? It actually started as ‘groovepapa’ – a silly gaming handle I used for Marathon LAN parties because I always danced to techno music in my chair while playing. As I coded more, it turned into ‘groovecoder’ but it was still just a silly name. After reading The Productive Programmer, I find it describes me well – I want to be “in the groove” when I code.
If you operated a food truck, what would be your specialty?
My truck would be “Stews and Brews” – it would serve a bowl of soup with a pint of beer.
Better Know a WebDev: Luke Crouch (aka groovecoder)

Posted: March 9th, 2012, 10:20am CST by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

It’s Friday, Friday, gotta write a blog post on Friday!

Hitting memes at the height of their popularity is easy. Dredging up memories weeks or months later is more fun.

Now, on to today’s Better Know a WebDev! In this corner, the Terror of Tulsa, the Oracle of Oklahoma, Luuuuuke Croooouch!

What do you do at Mozilla?
I learn a ton from other Mozillians while I work on the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) site. MDN hosts awesome web documentation and we’re expanding to host demos, events, profiles, and more. We’re migrating the wiki from MindTouch to our own Django-powered Kuma code – a clone of the Kitsune code that powers Support. Along the way we’re still adding features like BrowserID and fixing as many bugs as we can. I also organize our sprints and do a little product management until we hire an official MDN product manager. BTW, we’re hiring!
Any fun side projects you’re working on?
Most of my side projects are caught up in [tulsawebdevs.org], of which I’m the Chief Sanitation Officer. Specifically, I’m scraping some local public data and preparing for [tulsahackathon.com].

I also brew my own beer as often as I can. Once a month I retreat to a Benedictine Abbey here in Oklahoma to brew beer with them.
How did you get started in web development or programming?
I picked up an HTML book around ’93, kicked around in Flash while, took the Pascal, C, and Java classes in high school and took a webmaster vocational tech class. But I really decided to stick with web development when I hacked out my first database-powered HTML page one night in college – a table with 2 rows of dynamically-generated content using SQL Server and ASP on IIS!
How did you get involved with Mozilla?
I’ve used Firefox since I switched from Netscape Navigator. But I had only ever skirted around the contribution path (a behavior I’m also trying to address with our WebDev Stewards stuff).

As for working here, that’s a little complicated and involved a lot of luck! I built ajaxMyTop while doing “enterprise” development. When I got an unsolicited patch for it, I was hooked forever on the open-source model. So when I saw an online job posting for SourceForge.net, I jumped on it, got in, and learned a ton about open-source and web development. Four years later I saw an online job posting at Mozilla and I jumped again!
What’s a funny fail story or mistake you can share?
Don’t push big code changes while you’re at a conference!

We pushed changes to the SourceForge.net File Release System and corresponding download redirector while at OSCON ’09. It caused recursive redirects which broke all SourceForge.net downloads for over an hour! (Millions of downloads) The conference WiFi broke so a dozen of us had to share a single 2G cell phone ‘net connection to fix it.
What’s something you’re particularly proud of?
I was honored to give the keynote talk at PHP Conference Brasil in 2008, where I showed how SourceForge.net used PHP. I’m proud of all the Tulsa Web Devs – doing stuff every bit as cool as the web scenes in other towns. I’m proud of my wife for putting up with all my quirks and my nearly mono-maniacal focus on web development.
What’s coming up that you’re excited about?
All of Mozilla’s new stuff – Boot to Gecko, Apps, and Persona are extremely important projects for the internet. I’m trying to patch dochub so it could serve as MDN’s Open Web App, and I think we could try some cool things like MDN Open Web Badges. I also like the idea of using a federated wiki protocol for web documentation, and hosting web developer html5 ebooks on MDN.
What question do you wish you’d been asked?
What’s with the name ‘groovecoder’? It actually started as ‘groovepapa’ – a silly gaming handle I used for Marathon LAN parties because I always danced to techno music in my chair while playing. As I coded more, it turned into ‘groovecoder’ but it was still just a silly name. After reading The Productive Programmer, I find it describes me well – I want to be “in the groove” when I code.
If you operated a food truck, what would be your specialty?
My truck would be “Stews and Brews” – it would serve a bowl of soup with a pint of beer.
Better Know a WebDev: Kumar McMillan (aka kumar303)

Posted: March 2nd, 2012, 12:00pm CST by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

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.
Better Know a WebDev: Kumar McMillan (aka kumar303)

Posted: March 2nd, 2012, 12:00pm CST by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

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.
Better Know a WebDev: Greg Koberger aka gkoberger

Posted: January 27th, 2012, 11:49am CST by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

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.
Better Know a WebDev: Will Kahn-Greene aka willkg

Posted: January 20th, 2012, 3:26pm CST by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

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.
Better Know a WebDev: James Socol

Posted: January 13th, 2012, 3:46pm CST by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

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.
Better Know a WebDev: Mike Morgan (a.k.a. Morgamic)

Posted: January 6th, 2012, 1:49pm CST by James Socol

Tags: Better Know a WebDev [edit]

Our group has grown a lot over the past few years, as we’ve taken on new projects and done a whole lot of amazing new things. Naturally, as we’ve grown we’ve become a group of more diverse backgrounds, skills and interests—everything from awesome JavaScript developers to our growing Hadoop expertise.

So this is the first post in a new series, Better Know a WebDev, where we’ll introduce everyone, and hopefully get to know each other a little better!

We’ll start with the big man, the head honcho, Mike Morgan, a.k.a. morgamic, one of the original Mozilla web developers and now Director of Web Development.

What do you do at Mozilla?
I’m the Director of Web Development. My job is to help people in webdev achieve great things and grow as engineers—and hopefully as people. I spend a lot of time on recruiting, but one of my unwritten jobs is serving as the “glue” between strategy and operations. I help everyone understand why projects are important and how strategic goals break down into day-to-day tasks. Mostly, I try to maintain a great culture for our team.
Any fun side projects you’re working on?
I spend most of my free time playing basketball or dabbling in photography. I’m pretty notorious for taking way too many fisheye photos.
How did you get started in web development?
In March of 2001 I taught myself HTML, CSS and PHP because I was bored during Spring Break and didn’t have any money to go anywhere. In 5 days I created a blog, picked up HTML and CSS. My first blog didn’t have tables, which was pretty frustrating because I quickly discovered all the crazy bugs with IE 5.5 and IE 5.1 (Mac). From there I started working part time on websites and just fell into web development.
How did you get involved with Mozilla?
My first Mozilla project was redoing bugzilla.org, which is why I’m still on the developers page. The bulk of my work came later in 2004 and 2005 when I got involved with addons.mozilla.org, Bouncer (download.mozilla.org) and aus2.mozilla.org.

One of my most exciting times at Mozilla was the Firefox 1.0 launch. I wrote a blog post about it back in 2004. From there I just kept working on web services and sites for Firefox, going on to build and scale a lot of the original Firefox services. Since I was pretty busy, I usually looked like this:

What’s one mistake or funny fail story you’re willing to share?
Honestly, I can’t share the best fail stories publicly. But I’d say that accidentally wiping a production database with a bad DELETE statement is probably my biggest screw up. Don’t do that. Ever. There is no excuse and it’s embarrassing. Though if you do it once I hope you’re smart enough to never do it again. Just do it with a stage database.
What’s one thing coming up that you’re excited about? What’s exciting about it?
I want to play with camera and sound APIs in JavaScript. To have this all freed from Flash is a liberating and exciting concept. We are stepping into a time in our history where the web can literally do anything we can imagine. It’s so damn exciting—it’s just a wonderful time to be alive.

Mozilla is taking on proprietary app stores, identity and the mobile market. What a year 2012 will be. Tackling apps—freeing so much great content and capabilities currently locked down by one or two companies—it’s very exciting. When Mozilla gets this right, and I believe we will, it will be a great thing for everyone who uses the web on a desktop, phone, tablet, car, plane, refrigerator, etc.
What’s one question you’d like to be asked but haven’t been?
I guess I’d ask what I was most proud of, or what motivates me. Honestly, it’s pretty simple: my teammates. I’m surrounded by brilliant people who teach me something just about every day. The favorite part of my job is seeing them reach their goals and knowing I had a small part in it.