Entries tagged “mozilla”

We translated our site to Spanish and will continue to translate it into other languages in the future.

I have left the Mozilla Corporation this month. A lot of people have asked me why I decided to leave. To some, a decision like that is unfathomable. Mozilla has been my favorite place to work ever, so leaving was a difficult choice. I’ve done some things I’m proud of:

For the Mozilla Flux Web Development team we went to the Tech Shop and we lasered some cool stuff.

Most Mozilla webdev projects have an awful project structure, and it’s partially my fault. I’m attemtping to fix that, but I cringe every time someone creates a new playdoh (Mozilla’s Django template) based project.

I like building web sites, a lot. Usually every few years I need to re- evaluate the stack I use for a side-project. Joshua’s Stack Parts site is handy for this.

My friend and Web Dev colleague, James Socol, wrote a piece recently about some hiring things. I think it’s a good idea, and it would certainly make my job easier. It reminded me that I’m putting off a few posts about hiring.

I wrote about how to write filter queries using pyes. Unfortunately after using ElasticSearch in the Add-ons Builder, I realized that our code would become unwieldy and hard to read if we kept using straight up pyes.

I’ve been having a tough time navigating the Elastic Search docs, but some sleuthing in the test suite for pyes has proved helpful.

One problem we find with slug generators, is they do an awful job with unicode. For a string like this: Bän...g (bang) you get something like bng---g--bang- or at best bang-bang. But it’s 2011, urls can have unicode… here’s what we really want: bäng-bang.

When indexing a lot of data, you can save time by bulk loading data.

I’m slowly trying to familiarize myself with ElasticSearch and the pyes python interface. ElasticSearch uses a lot of plugins, and while the plugin system is easy to use, it’s not obvious where to find the plugins.

One of the great features of git is the ability to re-order commits, break commits into parts, and merge commits together.

Last week, someone informed me that my blog had been hacked:

A number of weeks ago I got annoyed with Firefox and decided to use Chrome for a while. This reminded me of the olden days where I used Netscape for a while, and then IE6 came out, and then Phoenix came out all the while I’d keep switching to the newest shiniest thing (note: I’m not sure about the timeline of all the browsers either).

So before I went on trip to Minnesota last month, I decided maybe I would give the Palm Pré another shot. After all, my parents have no internet access, so having the Pré… if I could overcome my issues, might be a welcome distraction.

I went to Add-on-Con some weeks back to represent my employer, the Mozilla Corporation.

So I borrowed a Palm Pré that we had at Mozilla to see what it was like. I was at first very excited, I remember before the Pre was released there was a lot of talk about how awesome-fantastic it was going to be. The stories of awesomeness sort of died, and I had thought nothing of it.

I wanted to find a list of Firefox addons that had smushed text in their title. E.g. FireBug or StumbleUpon. The normal porter stemming algorithm that Sphinx uses does not turn “StumbleUpon” into “stumbl upon” as it would with “Stumble Upon”. I was hoping for, and unfortunately could not find a method to do a regular expression search/replace using mysql. If I could, I could have Sphinx read “StumbleUpon” as “Stumble Upon” and all would be well (although in theory this would backfire).

Despite working on slimming the addons.mozilla.org database through dieting and exercise - I still have to occasionally do long running database tasks. So I finally tried out pipe viewer. As someone who’s impatient this has been awesome. Here’s some quick examples:

I went to DjangoCon this past week for work. Django is one of my favorite frameworks. I dropped PHP and the symfony framework to learn python and Django and I haven’t looked back. I think for Mozilla’s webdev team it would be the framework of choice. We have 100s of sites in many frameworks, but not a lot of resuability. Django apps are built to built to be reusable. If you build correctly you don’t have to refactor, it’s already done.

I use mysql and macports on OSX and both were broken when I upgraded to Snow Leopard.

While working on addons.mozilla.org I ran into an issue of git svn rebase continually asking me to merge a file, over and over.

I get bored with mundane tasks. So I create little adventures for myself. I had to create a list of countries and country codes to use on the Firefox mobile home page. The first few lists were incomplete, so I made my own by parsing a list provided by the International Telecommunication Union. I stripped it down to simple forms of the country names and removed codes that are very rare (satellite phones).

So I finally have one of those jobs where I can tell people almost every little detail about what I’m doing and I’m encouraged to talk to people on the intar-webs and solicit opinions.

Today I said my good-byes to Delicious.com and Yahoo! and tonight I went to the Addons Meetup @ Mozilla to get a sneak peak at what I’ll be working on in less than two weeks.

I was thrilled. I had no idea how many people to expect, but the Mozilla living room was packed - and most people were there the whole time. Real developers with really cool addons giving feedback to addons.mozilla.org directly. No matter how many blog comments, forums answered, customer care emails I responded to at Delicious - nothing beats the real insight and instant feedback you get from meeting a group of users face to face.

My brain, because of Delicious is always in data mining and analysis mode so through each presentation and each question asked, my brain was churning through things that I could build to bring some level of utility to the community.

I’m also happy to be joining an organization where everything is open sourced and available for comment. So I’m hoping to post a lot more on some of the cool tricks I do at Mozilla.