Bugs Ahoy: The Next Generation

There’s a new Bugs Ahoy in town, and it’s called Codetribute. The past I started the Bugs Ahoy project in October 2011 partly because I was procrastinating from studying for midterms, but mostly because I saw new contributors being overwhelmed by Bugzilla’s… Bugzilla-ness. I wanted to reduce the number of decisions that new contributors had […]

Code review: gatekeepers vs. coaches

I wrote a list of code review guidelines for the Servo project last year. They encapsulate the feedback that we expect our project contributors to provide when reviewing code changes, but I want to explore the motivation behind them. You’ll notice that almost every step is in the form “look for X”, followed by “suggest […]

You are receiving this mail because you are mentoring this bug

Good news! As of today, Bugzilla now sends out emails containing both an X-Bugzilla-Mentors header and a “You are mentoring this bug” message. This means that it’s now possible to highlight activity in your mentored bugs in your favourite email client! I use Gmail, so I’ve created a filter that searches for “You are mentoring […]

Taking a page from roc’s book

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Next steps for Bugs Ahoy: patches desired!

Bugs Ahoy is coasting along right now, and that’s fine. It fills a need, and apparently it does that pretty well from what I hear. However, there is a greater need – Mozilla needs a task board for all activities, and we need to not be distracted by reinventing yet another system. I’m kicking off […]

Numbers rule the world

One thing that has become clear in my work as a Firefox coding steward is that we have no idea how healthy our community is. When people ask me how many unpaid contributors we have, I don’t have an answer I can give them. The corollary to this is that any attempts to change our […]

Help wanted: using the github API with authentication

Bugs Ahoy retrieves issues from Github for certain categories (such as B2G and Test Automation). Unfortunately, I learned recently that unauthenticated API users are now limited to 60 requests an hour, and that means that these categories often end up broken. I really want to fix this by being an authenticated user, but OAuth scares […]

Private Browsing and You

Hello everyone, it’s your resident Private Browsing developer here! I’ll state it up front – the release of 15.0.1 was triggered by code I wrote that broke private browsing mode in significant, privacy-affecting ways. Ehsan and I fixed that for 15, 16, and 17 by backing out the problem code completely, but we’ve been working […]

Get your project listed in whatcanidoformozilla.org!

Back in June I created the slightly-misnamed What Can I Do For Mozilla tool (misnamed since it only focuses on code that needs writing, ignoring any other useful skills). It took off all over twitter, but I never actually formally announced it. Now, whatcanidoformozilla.org needs your help! I want to fill it with as many […]

Things I want someone to create for me, volume 1

A mechanism that automatically expands all collapsed merges in a pushlog view. I don’t care if it’s a Firefox extension or modification to the pushloghtml source that adds an expand=1 parameter to the query string; I am tired of manually expanding each one.