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 […]

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 […]

smartmake redux: harder, better, faster, stronger

Do you get frustrated about how long it takes to build Firefox after you’ve only made a small change to a single file? Have you heard the words “incremental build”, or tried to only build one or two directories but can’t figure out why your changes aren’t showing up? You are not alone. I released […]

A Firefox regression hunter VM!

I am happy to announce the first public unveiling of my Fox in a Box project. The enthusiasm for my idea of putting together a dev VM was loud and clear in my last post, mainly from testers who expressed interest in hunting regressions at a more granular level. The README in the first link […]

The Fast and the Furious: bzexport

If you’re a bzexport user, you’ll want to pull the latest revision. It’s recently been getting slower due to the number of http requests that need to be made (the tradeoff here is that it’s also been getting more correct), but I’ve pushed three patches that have reversed that downward slide into the molasses. By […]

nsCOMPtr has never been so pretty

Jim Blandy announced his archer-mozilla pretty-printers for Spidermonkey late last year. I’ve used them a few times while working on some JS proxy bugs, and I’ve found them to be invaluable. So invaluable, in fact, that I’ve written a bunch of pretty-printers for some pain points outside of js/. If this prospect excites you so […]